Pen used by Putin to sign Crimea treaty becomes museum piece

Moscow: A pen used by Russian President Vladimir Putin to sign Crimea’s independence treaty, will be displayed at the opening of an exhibition on Tuesday at the State Museum of Contemporary Russian History in Moscow. [caption id=“attachment_2158457” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Putin and two Crimean leaders signed a treaty on 18 March, 2014 on making the Ukrainian Black Sea peninsula a part of Russia. Reuters[/caption] “There were a total of four pens quantitatively to the signatories. We have the pen which Putin used to sign the treaty,” Tass news agency quoted museum director Irina Velikanova as saying. The exhibition titled “Crimea: The History Of Return”, prepared jointly by the Tavrida Central Museum in Simferopol and Russian Museum of Ethnography in St. Petersburg, has a total of 450 pieces and consists of three sections. The sections are devoted to Crimea’s history as part of the Russian empire, the main events in the peninsula in the 20th century, and its search for national and political identity in the early 1990s. “There are also the materials devoted to the events of spring 2014 – leaflets, posters and the uniform of Crimea’s Berkut (special police force) fighters which we received from our colleagues in Crimea,” Velikanova said. The exhibition will continue till 12 April. Russia and Crimea signed a treaty on the republic’s accession to Russia on March 16, 2014. The document was inked by the Russian president, the leadership of Crimea and the mayor of Sevastopol. Crimea used to be part of Russia from 1784 until 1954 when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev handed it over to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Crimea remained part of independent Ukraine after Soviet Ukraine collapsed in 1991. IANS