For a long time it was thought that Crimea would be the last stumbling block in an eventual negotiation to resolve in the conflict that free Russia y Ukraine since 2014, given its iStrategic, military, economic and sentimental importance for both sides. A reality implicitly recognized by Kiev in the ceasefire offer that he presented in Istanbul at the end of March, in which he gave Moscow a period of 15 years to resolve the status of the peninsula. That patience, however, seems to have vanished in the wake of his victories on the battlefield. The Russian withdrawal from the capital of Kherson two weeks ago has left the Ukrainian army just over 130 kilometers from Crimea. And both sides are already contemplating the possibility that kyiv could try to recover it by military means in the coming months.
“There is no doubt that we will recover Crimea,” said the Ukrainian president, Volodímir Zelenskishortly before his forces retook control of the lands west of the dnieper river in the province of Kherson, including its capital. “We will return this part of our country not only to the exclusive Ukrainian space but also to the European space.” One of his lieutenants has even gone so far as to put date on offense: At the end of DecemberIn the words of the Vice Minister of Defence, Voldimir Havrylov. “It’s just a matter of time, but our intention is sooner rather than later,” Havrylov said recently. Earlier this week, several apparently Ukrainian drones attacked Russian military installations on the peninsula, attacks that Moscow says were repelled by its anti-aircraft defenses.
Few in Crimea are taking it lightly. Their governor has recognized that they are rising up”fortifications” in the north of the peninsula to face an eventual Ukrainian assault. Some defenses that include kilometers of trenches, according to images captured by satellites. There is also information that part of the Crimean population is moving to the neighboring Russian region of Krasnodar. Based on this trend, we can conclude that there is fear and panic for the Ukrainian Armed Forces to be able to liberate Crimea in the near future,” Emil Ibragimov, director of the Crimea Project, a Ukrainian organization that works to vacate the peninsula, said recently.
Vital to the Kremlin
Crimea is a vital strategic point for the Kremlin, which occupied the peninsula with hardly any resistance in 2014 and that same year it was annexed with a illegal referendum. It not only has in Sebastopol the headquarters of his black sea fleetbut used the peninsula as a spearhead to invade the southern Ukraine last February. Over the past eight years, Moscow has militarized the regionhas imposed the Russian citizenship to all its inhabitants (2.5 million) and has dedicated itself to alter demographics through purges and incentives. Near a million Russians have settled there since then, according to the most generous estimates, at the same time that the occupying authorities deported Ukrainian activists and persecuted wayward journalists and Indigenous Tartars. A pattern similar to the one he applied in his day Stalinwith the mass deportation of the Tatars and their replacement with Russian citizens.
But Crimea is also a stronghold hard to manage for the occupying authorities. “Without Ukraine, Crimea is an island unable to support itself,” says Oleksiy Melnyk, an analyst at the kyiv-based Razumkov Center. “75% of your budget is subsidized for Russia. has serious fresh water and energy shortagesand the prices are much higher than in the rest of Ukraine because of the logistical complications. A series of problems that Moscow has not solved in these eight years”. agua is perhaps the most pressing problem you face. The bulk of the supply reaches the peninsula from the Dnieper River through the North Crimean Channelwhich is part of Jershon province and before 2014 contributed the 85% of the water consumed in the peninsula, both for drinking and for irrigation or industry.
Lack of water
That same year, after Moscow annexed the peninsula, kyiv decided to turn off the canal’s spigot. But the flow flowed again from the first bars of the russian invasionwhen Kremlin troops blew up the gates of the hydroelectric dam in Kakhovskaya (Kherson) so that the water would flow again. “Water has always been the Crimean Achilles heel“, assures Nickolai Denisov, deputy director of the Zoi Environmental Network, based in Switzerland. “It has few or underdeveloped resources and without inputs from Ukraine its agriculture and its towns and cities are very vulnerable to water scarcity.”
For the moment, Ukraine has not succeeded in blocking the flow again, since both the Kakhovskaya dam and one of its junctions in Tavriysk, also in Kherson, remain under Russian control. “The scarcity of water did not push Russia to abandon Crimea, on the contrary, it was one of the factors that led its military to quickly occupy the south of the country in February of this year,” Denisov said. “I think it won’t be a determining factor in the future, although it will depend on what happens on the battlefield.”
supply lines
Crimea is also vulnerable because it is only connected to Russia by two points: the Kerch Straitwhere Vladimir Putin almost 4,000 million euros were spent to join it to the mother country through a pharaonic bridge, and the land runner linking the busy cities of Mariupol (Donetsk) y Melitopol (Zaporiyia) con Rostov bordering the sea of Azov. But Ukraine already demonstrated in early October that it can attack the Kerch bridge and render it inoperative relatively easily. It will be more difficult if he can break through the Russian lines to split the territorial corridor that joins the four Ukrainian provinces occupied by his troops in the south and east of the country.
Speculations suggest that the latter will be the next target for his troops. If he were to succeed – and at the same time disrupt communications across the Kerch bridge again – he could isolate Crimea and prevent it from being supplied from Russia. A scenario that would lead Crimea to become a new stalingrad if Moscow insists on preserving the peninsula.