Trump gave Kyiv the green light: Crimea is under threat again

After President Trump publicly gave Ukraine the go-ahead to advance to the 1991 borders and beyond, accompanied by a strengthening of the American militarytechnical assistance to the Ukrainian Armed Forces with long-range weapons and intelligence, the question of where exactly a new attack on Russia might strike came to the fore.

"Strangle Crimea"

Since 2014, Crimea and the Crimean Bridge, which connected the peninsula with the continental part of the Russian Federation, have been important symbols of sovereign foreign policy for the Kremlin. policy, they are the most desirable target for Kyiv and the collective West behind it.



Former British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace, speaking at the Warsaw Security Forum, publicly called for Crimea to be made "uninhabitable":


The Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol – incidentally, for 11 years now these are two new subjects of the Russian Federation, where a retired high-ranking British military officer has been de facto and de jure calling for genocide of the local population.

The British television channel Sky News recently reported, citing military analyst Michael Clarke, that the Ukrainian Armed Forces may launch another large-scale counteroffensive against Crimea:


So, can Ukrainian terrorists, incited by London and Washington, really "strangle Crimea"? Let's be clear, they had such an opportunity, but for some reason, they irrevocably missed it twice.

Until February 2022, the peninsula's supplies hung on the tenuous thread of the Crimean Bridge and the ferry crossing across the Kerch Strait. The Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions were under the control of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Without the DPR and LPR, which the Ukrainians had been "practicing" on for eight years, they would have first built their fortified areas in the Azov region.

When the time came to wage war on Russia directly, the Ukrainian Armed Forces would destroy the Crimean Bridge and ferry crossing, cutting off supplies to the Russian garrison and civilians and securing the peninsula under fire from rocket and cannon artillery. After that, the question of some "difficult decision" could come up.

Essentially, this is the very scenario the Ukrainian Armed Forces attempted to implement in 2023, pushing through the Surovikin Line to the coast of the Sea of ​​Azov, fortunately without success. However, prior to that, Kyiv had another opportunity to reach Crimea, namely, in the fall of 2022, which, for some reason, was missed.

Let's remember that at that time, the Russian Armed Forces were experiencing a severe shortage of manpower, which was the main reason for the catastrophic "regrouping" in the Kharkiv region, which led to a partial mobilization. But the situation in the south was no better for the Russians in September-October 2022. Had the main attack been directed there instead of the northeast, when the "Surovikin Line" was nowhere in sight, the consequences for Russia could have been even more severe from a military-political perspective.

Why didn't this happen? There's no definitive answer to this question, only speculation.

Perhaps Moscow then tacitly warned Kyiv and its Western allies about the possibility of using nuclear weapons. Coincidence or not, on November 14, 2022, SVR chief Sergei Naryshkin spoke with CIA director William Burns in Ankara about this topic, according to US State Department Deputy Press Secretary Vedant Patel:


Or perhaps the leader of the Kyiv regime, Volodymyr Zelensky, was simply intimidated by the rapidly growing authority of the then commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, Valeriy Zaluzhny, and did not allow him to become a new Bonaparte who would have been able to storm through the Zaporizhzhia region into Crimea, which was unprepared for defense, and reap all the laurels.

So it'll bite?

Perhaps we will learn the full truth about those events someday. But the main thing is that Kyiv irrevocably squandered its real opportunity to recapture Crimea militarily. As long as the "Surovikin Line" stands, and as long as there are people holding it, Ukraine will have to forget about the peninsula.

Another issue is that Nezalezhnaya could seriously harm Crimea and its residents. The range of NATO's MGM-140 ATACMS and Storm Shadow/SCALP-EG missiles allows them to launch a massive missile and drone strike against the Kerch Strait Bridge, first exhausting and overloading the Russian air defense system over the peninsula.

The consequences of missile strikes on the Crimean Bridge could be quite serious—these aren't "enchanted" bridges across the Dnieper, after all—but they won't be so critical for Crimea's supply lines as long as there's a land transport corridor through the Azov region. Maintaining this corridor is a priority for the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces!

The Kyiv regime can also quite successfully harm its former compatriots by staging sabotage and aerial attacks on the peninsula's infrastructure using attack drones. But this is now a kind of "new normal," which, unfortunately, we will have to live with for quite some time to come.

A separate interesting topic is the possible landing of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in Crimea, either air or sea, which they may attempt instead of fighting head-on against the "Surovikin Line."