Will Ukraine Retake Crimea?

In a piece at Foreign Affairs retired Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman explains what it would require for Ukraine to retake Crimea:

For much of last year, while the idea of liberating Crimea remained academic, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was willing to set aside the question of the region’s near-term status. Ukrainian forces were focused on liberating occupied territory outside the peninsula, and the future of Crimea seemed likely to be determined after the end of the war through diplomatic negotiations. But as the war has progressed and Ukraine has liberated large swaths of its territory from occupying Russian forces, Zelensky’s rhetoric regarding Crimea has shifted. “Crimea is our land, our territory,” he said last month in a video appeal to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “Give us your weapons,” he urged, and Ukraine will retake “what is ours.” And according to The New York Times, the Biden administration has begun to come around to the idea that Ukraine may need to threaten Russia’s foothold on the peninsula to strengthen its negotiating position, even at the risk of escalating the conflict.

If earnest negotiations were to start soon, Zelensky might still be open to a deal that ended the war and deferred the question of Crimea to a later date. But if the fighting drags on through the spring and summer and Ukraine inflicts enormous casualties on Russia while liberating substantial territory, it will become increasingly difficult for Zelensky to grant Putin a face-saving exit from the war and permit Russia’s continued but temporary occupation of Crimea. By the summer, Ukraine is likely to begin targeting more of Russia’s military infrastructure in Crimea in preparation for a broader campaign to liberate the peninsula. Instead of waiting for this scenario to play out, risking a longer and more dangerous war that could embroil NATO, Washington should give Ukraine the weapons and assistance it needs to win quickly and decisively in all occupied territories north of Crimea—and to credibly threaten to take the peninsula militarily.

Doing so would force Putin to the negotiating table and create an opening for diplomatic talks while the final status of Crimea remains unsettled, offering Putin a path out of Ukraine that doesn’t guarantee his political demise and allowing Ukraine to avoid an enormously costly military campaign that is by no means guaranteed to succeed. The eventual deal would require an immediate reduction of Russian conventional forces on the peninsula and outline a path to a referendum allowing the people of Crimea, including those displaced after the 2014 invasion, to determine the final status of the region.

Contrary to what some skeptical analysts have asserted, a Ukrainian military campaign to liberate Crimea is hardly out of the question. The first step would be to pin down Russia’s forces in the Kherson and Luhansk regions and in the northern part of Donetsk. Next, Ukraine would free the remainder of Zaporizhzhia Province and push through southern Donetsk to reach the Sea of Azov, severing Russia’s land bridge to Ukraine. Ukrainian forces would also need to destroy the Kerch Strait Bridge, which connects Russia to the Crimean Peninsula and allows Moscow to resupply its troops by road and rail. An explosion knocked out part of the bridge in October 2022, but it may be fully restored by the summer.

Without a land bridge or road or rail links to Crimea, the Kremlin would be forced to revert to maritime resupply, but ferries and barges would not meet its logistical needs for fighting in Crimea and southern Ukraine. Meanwhile, Ukrainian forces would carry out weeks of strikes on Russian forces and infrastructure to degrade the enemy’s military capability. Targets would include logistics hubs, air bases, command and control centers, naval installations, and transportation nodes.

If Ukraine were to succeed in this initial phase of the operation, it would need to conduct land and amphibious attacks to gain a foothold in Crimea—another herculean effort. Then it would need to build up forces in multiple locations in northern Crimea so that it could seize large strategic installations such as the base of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol, the Crimean capital of Simferopol, the coastal city of Feodosiya, and the port of Kerch. To achieve these objectives, Ukraine would need to concentrate its forces in Kherson and in newly captured territory in northern Crimea, making them vulnerable to a Russian tactical nuclear strike. For this reason (and because the loss of Crimea could endanger Putin’s regime), the final phase of this campaign would be the most perilous.

Even with a flood of Western support, Ukraine would struggle to undertake such an operation. The German Leopard 2 tanks, British Challenger 2 tanks, and American M1 Abrams tanks and M2 Bradley infantry fighting vehicles promised in recent weeks would certainly improve the odds. But the Ukrainian military would need hundreds of these vehicles as well as an air attack capability (either a dozen well-armed combat drones or hundreds of smaller single-use anti-armor drones), thousands of HIMARS (High Mobility Artillery Rocket System) rounds and long-range missiles, and tens of thousands of artillery shells. It would also need greater manned airpower and engineering, amphibious, and logistics capacity to penetrate fortified Russian defensive lines, clear hundreds of miles of occupied territory, and conduct amphibious and ground assaults to cross into Crimea and dislodge Russian forces.

Meanwhile, in a piece at USNI News John Gates quotes former Defense Secretary Robert Gates on the implications of Ukraine’s recapturing Crimea:

Losing Crimea, which holds an important naval base in Sevastopol, to Ukraine would cross a “real red line” for Russia and likely risk an escalation of the ongoing war, a former U.S. defense secretary said Wednesday.
Reclaiming Crimea would be “an exceptionally difficult fight” because Russian President Vladimir Putin attaches so much importance to it, former Defense Secretary Robert Gates said during an online forum hosted by The Washington Post. Moscow annexed Crimea in 2014, saying it was protecting the base and defending its citizens living there.

Gates said he believes Ukraine could take back control of the Donbas region. It has seen more than eight years of fighting after the Kremlin openly backed separatists there with men, equipment and financial support as it was illegally annexing Crimea.

The critical issue for Ukraine is how quickly the United States and NATO allies can get equipment like tanks and other armored vehicles into the country, Gates said.

“We ought to be airlifting some of that equipment to Poland now,” he said.

This includes the American Abrams M-1A1 tanks and German Leopard tanks, armored personnel carriers and Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected [MRAP] vehicles, Gates said.

Russia is gauging the speed at which it can draft an additional 120,000 men, which would bring the number of new troops that need training and equipment to bolster defenses and launch a counteroffensive to 500,000. He said a new Russian push could begin as early as the anniversary of the invasion, Feb. 24.

Gates questioned whether Ukraine needs F-16 fighters since the Russians have not been able to gain air superiority even in areas they control in the eastern part of the country. Ukrainian “air defenses may make the need for F-16s moot,” he said.

There are a number of factors that go unmentioned in either article.

• Russia has few natural borders.
• Russia has been invaded by Britain, France, Germany, and, believe it or not, the United States (Ike was there as a young officer) over the period of the last 200 years. If you expand your timeline to 600 years, add Poland, Finland, Mongolia, and many others to that list.
• Russian access to the port at Sevastopol as well as denial of access to it by Britain, France, and now the United States has been a key factor in Russian foreign policy for 200 years.
• Until Crimea was ceded to the Ukraine Soviet Socialist Republic in 1954 it had been a part of Russia proper for 200 years.
• There is a direct causal relationship between Russia’s occupation of Crimea and the forcible replacement of a pro-Russian government in Kyiv with an anti-Russian one.
• It is alleged that Russian regulars prevented a free and fair election in Crimea in March 2014.
• If Putin is forced from power as a consequence of losing Crimea, the most likely candidates to replace him are more nationalistic, aggressive, and oriented towards the use of force than he.
• At present Ukraine is losing ground rather than gaining it.
• It is impossible to determine the veracity of either Russian or Ukrainian casualty figures. I have seen estimates by U. S. experts as high as 150,000 Ukrainian military deaths.
• Russia has been three and four times Ukraine’s population.
• We have no actual idea of Russia’s ability to produce heavy weapons, e.g. tanks and other armored vehicles.
• It may well be greater than the combined capacity of NATO countries for the simple reasons that we have been reducing our capacity rapidly, they have not, and it takes time to rebuild that capacity.
• Lt. Col. Vindman was born in Ukraine and has a notable anti-Russian bias.

That doesn’t mean that he’s wrong; it does suggest that we can’t assume that he’s right. Please note that I am not defending Russia’s actions. I’m attempting to explain them as well as suggest how events are likely to unfold. I doubt that I can persuade anybody that Russia is not expansionist but irredentist and paranoid but I do believe that those are the case.