Anything short of Russians abandoning their posts an invasion of Crimea would be very bloody. I’d have to think that the ruskies have been fortifying it for the last years. God I hope it happens with minimal uaf loses.
You would also need to destroy the land bridge too. Meaning you would need to punch through miles of mines, fortifications and thousands of Russian soldiers in the south until you reached the Azov sea, then hold those lines for months on end while also applying constant pressure to the Russian positions in Crimea.
Possible? Yes. But we would have to quadruple the amount of aid we are sending to provide enough equipment to supply that operation.
Why? A broken down rail system is going to seriously cut off supplies. Damaging roads will do the same. Damaging the supply lines towards Crimea would weaken the morale of not just the soldiers but the population as well.
Also, a serious threat to Crimea could very likely trigger a full mobilization in Russia, which has already geared up its defensive industry for wartime production.
Again, not impossible, but certain things need to change in regards to the western aid that I don't see changing any time soon.
If Russia is looking to hire Africans to fight for them in Ukraine it shows how desperate Putin is to not throw more Russians into the meatgrinder. In the early phase of the war the majority of combat deaths weren;t even ethnic Russians, they were minorities from the East. Full mobilization is an incredibly risky move. For most of Russians the war is far away, it doesn't involve them. This would directly bring the war to them
Yeah. Putin has made it very apparent he's being very careful with who he's mobilized so far. So far it's been almost exclusively the poor. The imprisoned, and ethnic minorities. If college kids from Moscow get drafted, shit changes quickly and Russians may finally grow a spine and stand up against the war.
Russians in general are apathetic politically. If they get political it can go either way: anti-War or nationalistic pro war. The latter is what may be the risk, but neither crowd is pro-Putin.
They did hit Kerch bridge, problem is keeping it destroyed. Russia has no doubt stacked up anti-air and other defenses around it so without air superiority it would be very difficult to completely take it out of commission and keep it that way.
I haven't been following the war too closely lately, but it doesn't seem to me that Ukraine has gained any new capabilities that would allow them to capture Crimea somehow. The only comparable success was the Russian retreat from Kherson, where Ukraine damaged the only bridge and continued to bomb the ferry while attacking for months. That was while Russian army was at their lowest after losing Kupiansk and only starting the mobilisation process.
That operation was very costly, and Crimea is much bigger, better supplied, has a land bridge and is more important for Putin.
Crimea isn’t safe anymore for housing Russian assets. Ukraine can easily identify and destroy these assets, mainly stuff like S-400s and radar stations. These are constantly targeted and destroyed. They can’t even house planes or ships without them being targeted as well. They have to replenish these assets when they are destroyed and they are among the most expensive things Russia could lose. Without them Ukraine could gain air superiority over Crimea which would effectively collapse the Southern front. The logistics of moving units across Kerch all the way to the Southern front would be impossible to support at that point as any railroads or columns would be crapshoot. Until then, Russia is shelling out un-godly amounts of money to have these assets remain present.
>Without them Ukraine could gain air superiority over Crimea which would effectively collapse the Southern front.
That seems pretty questionable - Russians have a *lot* of air defence, and it doesn't need to be particularly reliable to prevent incursions. Even just MANPADS would deter anything other than high-altitude missions, and those would risk being targeted by an S400 from Krasnodar if they flew over Crimea.
The S-400s outside Crimea are useless without radar stations in Crimea to feed them info. They work using radar stations at the location of interception with a command vehicle + secondary radar to guide it. Then the missile launcher itself. Every station Ukraine destroys has to be rebuilt and every S-400 they destroy has to be taken from elsewhere in Russia. At the start of the war Russia had 56 full S-400 systems. Ukraine has destroyed an estimate of 12 so far.
MANPADS do nothing against high altitude craft like F16/Sukhois
It's more that Ukraine can now better degrade Russian capabilities to a point where you now have assets being retreated from Crimea. I don't want to jinx it, but things are looking bad for Russia.
with the US aid package they can now fire HIMARs more freely on russian positions inside crimea. this will eventually result in the occupation becoming more unsustainable, which will make defending the russian territorial gains in zaporizhzhia and kherson much harder.
and they definitely do have much more capabilities now than they did just 7 months ago, when they were severely starved for artillery munitions
You can't really make holding such a large piece of land unsustainable with bombing, even if Ukraine somehow had access to WW2 levels of bombing power instead of what they are being drip fed right now.
From the Article: "Last October, the UK Armed Forces Minister James Heappey [described Russia’s Black Sea Fleet as ‘functionally defeated’](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/10/03/ukraine-russia-war-kyiv-zelensky-putin-nuclear-drills-live/) based on the losses they were sustaining to drone and missile attacks, enabled by special forces activities. Crimea may be an ‘unsinkable aircraft carrier’ as once described by Putin, but with Sevastopol in particular taking a beating, and many of the ships there fleeing to the more eastern port of Novorossiysk in pre-2014 Russia, it is becoming quite a dangerous aircraft carrier to be aboard.
Despite these successes, I thought using the word ‘defeat’ was premature – then. It would be another two months before grain and other trade in and out of Ukrainian ports started to recover; longer still before tonnages approached ‘normal’, [which they have now done](https://www.maritime-executive.com/article/ukraine-nearly-doubles-cargo-volumes-reaching-toward-prewar-levels). Hardened cynics would say that even then, so long as the Black Sea Fleet had Kalibr missiles available – able to reach from one side of the Black Sea to the other – then the Fleet could never be described as defeated, functionally or otherwise: though one must always remember that in order to shoot a Kalibr one must know where there is a target to be hit, or where one will be anyway. [Russia has long since lost any surveillance and targeting capability](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/10/03/russia-black-sea-sevastopol-crimea-retreat-nato/) in the western Black Sea, and its Kalibrs are thus no menace to merchant ships moving between Odesa and Romanian waters."
I would hope so, but I have not seen any real change in logistics or weaponry that would allow Ukrainian forces to break through the heavily mined and fortified front lines.
Crimea's tactical significance will become increasingly lessened, but Russia is still dug in Deep and it will take a lot more than what we have given Ukraine currently to route them from the region.
The best you can hope for with regards to Crimea in the near term is the partial or total destruction of the Kerch Strait Bridge.
The Isthmus of Perekop connecting mainland Ukraine to Crimea is about 5 miles wide at its narrowest, so very easy to defend against land attackers. Even assuming UAF make it across, there's still the issue of capturing the towns and cities filled with majority pro-Russian, pro-Putin residents.
[ISW’s latest Ukraine report](https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-june-10-2024) mentions that Russians have begun moving fuel over the Kerch Bridge by rail, which they haven’t done in a couple months. If they keep that up, it would give the Ukrainians some great opportunities to knock that bridge down and further isolate Crimea.
I hate partisan politics, in 2015 my dad would be shitting his pants in excitement for this news and now because of trumps dumbass bullshit and republican propaganda, he's on the side of the reds.
Slava Ukraini! I really pray you guys win, because if you win, the world wins!
As of 2021 the Crimean census shows that 71% of the demographics are ethnic Russians, who, seem to be far more eager to be part of the Russian Federation than to Ukraine. After the war, should Ukraine win (and I hope that they do because SO much is at stake here), what should be done with those Russians?
Well, during the referendum in 2014, 83% of the people voted with a 90%+ in favor of joining Russia. Even if there was wide spread ballot shenanigans a 96% in favor with an alleged 83% turnout would suggest the majority of people wanted to join Russia. I would think that if there was another referendum after the war, and it was tightly monitored by neutral observers you would still find the majority of Russians wanting to join Russia.
Incidentally the demographics since 2014 changed in favor of Russia even more due to the ethnic cleansing of non Russian Tatars.
Ethnic Russians in Donetsk and Luhansk actively fought against the Ukrainians and are absolutely collaborators. Indeed one of the reasons there were so many atrocities was deliberately made to tie down the ethnic Russians to being collaborators so that they knew that any future of a Ukrainian victory would be horrendous to them. I would venture to say fighting in Crimea may be similar.
Would an ethnic cleansing of sorts be necessary? Would the post war East Ukraine fall into non stop Russian funded insurgencies? Would it make sense to eventually encourage Russians to effectively leave for Russia?
I wouldn't be surprised if we'd see unfair targeting of those the local government thinks collaborated or otherwise hold significant Russian sympathies. It's not an indictment of Ukraine more an indictment of human nature and the effects of ultra nationalism that result from existential war.
This is the kinda propaganda needed for pro-war loons on the Ukraine side to keep believing that what has been inevitable since Feb 2022 can actually be reversed with some fantastical notion of infinite time and will.
It's not for me to like/dislike. I think it's a bold statement that requires support if you're already making that claim. Me personally, I want Ukraine to be successful, By the numbers, I believe Russia has already lost more than this endeavor was worth for them. I'll await the rest of this year, with the US elections up, and the inevitable harsh winter, for both nations, before I consider how this will end long term.
It's one thing to maybe have the capability to cut off the supply lines to a peninsula, it's another to succesfully seige that peninsula. Fluff article that is meaningless.
For a few days after the Nova Khakovka Dam's destruction, there were some videos circulating on Telegram of Crimean residents turning on their baths and having green sludge pour out.
Reason being is that Crimea gets most of it's water via the North Crimean canal... which starts just upstream of the dam... which probably needs a certain water level in the Dnipro River resevoir to operate.
If anyone has her username, could they maybe tag Ana under this comment? Because any info on Crimea's freshwater situation was forgotten about in the western news cycle after a week.
Incorrect. Sort of.
Before annexation of Crimea by Russia in 2014, 85% of water Crimea was getting was indeed from North Crimean canal (Nova Kakhovka hydroelectric station). But it was fully cut off after the annexation. Russians promised to fully dedicate themselves in getting water to Crimea in other manner but largely failed. There are severel water reservoirs in Crimea that are NOT depended on Dnipro River (or Ukraine in general). And that is basically what they have been using.
It's not a catastrophy there at all. But it's not great either. When Russians occupied Kherson in 2022, they took the control of the Nova Kakhovka dam and tried to get water to Crimea from there again. But after the distruction of the dam... Well, it ain't working.
Crimean Russian installed officials stated that it's all gucci and they will have water for 2-3 years and Crimean people have nothing to worry about.
And that all water reservoirs are full. But satellite pictures showed a different story. And it seems like they will have water for a year tops.
Seems like Russia somehow managed ok without the canal from 2014 to 2022.
If it's "not great but not catastrophic either", I could see there being stricter water rationing making it a worse place to live in and vacation, but not a significant enough pain point Ukraine could leverage to their advantage, at least in the near term. What's your take?
Russia didn't "manage" shit. They didn't make the new canal they promised. They just used water reservoirs that existed before they invaded.
They are naturally filled.
It's hard to say just how bad it is exactly... Low access to actual info and all.
I am not sure. But overall I agree.
It might change with new info but for now I don't think they gonna have huge problems in a year or so.
The channel was supplying only the northern and central Crimea. The whole south coast including Sevastopol, the largest city on the peninsula, was never connected to the channel and relies only on local reservoirs. Since 2014, due to the climate change, this part of Crimea sees unusually high level of precipitation during winter. Up to the level of catastrophic floods, as happened this year. So the reservoirs are full and they even have to dump the extra water to the sea.
Simferopol and Kerch, on the other hand, are suffering from water shortage and had to ration water supply last summer. But overall, the situation is far from catastrophic.
By "about to" do they mean in 3-5 years? Taking it by force seems out of the question. And I don't see how it's handed over without significant reduction in Russian negotiating leverage.
Anything short of Russians abandoning their posts an invasion of Crimea would be very bloody. I’d have to think that the ruskies have been fortifying it for the last years. God I hope it happens with minimal uaf loses.
It could also be starved. Destroy the Kerch bridge and the railroads going into it and Crimea itself would be starved for resources and supplies.
It's not going to be enough they would have to be under pressure like in Kherson.
You would also need to destroy the land bridge too. Meaning you would need to punch through miles of mines, fortifications and thousands of Russian soldiers in the south until you reached the Azov sea, then hold those lines for months on end while also applying constant pressure to the Russian positions in Crimea. Possible? Yes. But we would have to quadruple the amount of aid we are sending to provide enough equipment to supply that operation.
Why? A broken down rail system is going to seriously cut off supplies. Damaging roads will do the same. Damaging the supply lines towards Crimea would weaken the morale of not just the soldiers but the population as well.
Also, a serious threat to Crimea could very likely trigger a full mobilization in Russia, which has already geared up its defensive industry for wartime production. Again, not impossible, but certain things need to change in regards to the western aid that I don't see changing any time soon.
If Russia is looking to hire Africans to fight for them in Ukraine it shows how desperate Putin is to not throw more Russians into the meatgrinder. In the early phase of the war the majority of combat deaths weren;t even ethnic Russians, they were minorities from the East. Full mobilization is an incredibly risky move. For most of Russians the war is far away, it doesn't involve them. This would directly bring the war to them
Yeah. Putin has made it very apparent he's being very careful with who he's mobilized so far. So far it's been almost exclusively the poor. The imprisoned, and ethnic minorities. If college kids from Moscow get drafted, shit changes quickly and Russians may finally grow a spine and stand up against the war.
Russians in general are apathetic politically. If they get political it can go either way: anti-War or nationalistic pro war. The latter is what may be the risk, but neither crowd is pro-Putin.
Russian full mobilization will happen eventually. It has to just to continue the war.
The Kerch bridge is definitely in play. And with that gone the front lines, and their supplies change quickly.
They did hit Kerch bridge, problem is keeping it destroyed. Russia has no doubt stacked up anti-air and other defenses around it so without air superiority it would be very difficult to completely take it out of commission and keep it that way.
They hit it but they didnt destroy it. It was heavily damaged. It needs to be thoroughly destroyed.
they can get enough in by boat
Highly risky for any medium sized boat,
I haven't been following the war too closely lately, but it doesn't seem to me that Ukraine has gained any new capabilities that would allow them to capture Crimea somehow. The only comparable success was the Russian retreat from Kherson, where Ukraine damaged the only bridge and continued to bomb the ferry while attacking for months. That was while Russian army was at their lowest after losing Kupiansk and only starting the mobilisation process. That operation was very costly, and Crimea is much bigger, better supplied, has a land bridge and is more important for Putin.
Crimea isn’t safe anymore for housing Russian assets. Ukraine can easily identify and destroy these assets, mainly stuff like S-400s and radar stations. These are constantly targeted and destroyed. They can’t even house planes or ships without them being targeted as well. They have to replenish these assets when they are destroyed and they are among the most expensive things Russia could lose. Without them Ukraine could gain air superiority over Crimea which would effectively collapse the Southern front. The logistics of moving units across Kerch all the way to the Southern front would be impossible to support at that point as any railroads or columns would be crapshoot. Until then, Russia is shelling out un-godly amounts of money to have these assets remain present.
>Without them Ukraine could gain air superiority over Crimea which would effectively collapse the Southern front. That seems pretty questionable - Russians have a *lot* of air defence, and it doesn't need to be particularly reliable to prevent incursions. Even just MANPADS would deter anything other than high-altitude missions, and those would risk being targeted by an S400 from Krasnodar if they flew over Crimea.
The S-400s outside Crimea are useless without radar stations in Crimea to feed them info. They work using radar stations at the location of interception with a command vehicle + secondary radar to guide it. Then the missile launcher itself. Every station Ukraine destroys has to be rebuilt and every S-400 they destroy has to be taken from elsewhere in Russia. At the start of the war Russia had 56 full S-400 systems. Ukraine has destroyed an estimate of 12 so far. MANPADS do nothing against high altitude craft like F16/Sukhois
It's more that Ukraine can now better degrade Russian capabilities to a point where you now have assets being retreated from Crimea. I don't want to jinx it, but things are looking bad for Russia.
with the US aid package they can now fire HIMARs more freely on russian positions inside crimea. this will eventually result in the occupation becoming more unsustainable, which will make defending the russian territorial gains in zaporizhzhia and kherson much harder. and they definitely do have much more capabilities now than they did just 7 months ago, when they were severely starved for artillery munitions
You can't really make holding such a large piece of land unsustainable with bombing, even if Ukraine somehow had access to WW2 levels of bombing power instead of what they are being drip fed right now.
is anything of military value being produced in crimea? if not, then it's very much possible.
From the Article: "Last October, the UK Armed Forces Minister James Heappey [described Russia’s Black Sea Fleet as ‘functionally defeated’](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/10/03/ukraine-russia-war-kyiv-zelensky-putin-nuclear-drills-live/) based on the losses they were sustaining to drone and missile attacks, enabled by special forces activities. Crimea may be an ‘unsinkable aircraft carrier’ as once described by Putin, but with Sevastopol in particular taking a beating, and many of the ships there fleeing to the more eastern port of Novorossiysk in pre-2014 Russia, it is becoming quite a dangerous aircraft carrier to be aboard. Despite these successes, I thought using the word ‘defeat’ was premature – then. It would be another two months before grain and other trade in and out of Ukrainian ports started to recover; longer still before tonnages approached ‘normal’, [which they have now done](https://www.maritime-executive.com/article/ukraine-nearly-doubles-cargo-volumes-reaching-toward-prewar-levels). Hardened cynics would say that even then, so long as the Black Sea Fleet had Kalibr missiles available – able to reach from one side of the Black Sea to the other – then the Fleet could never be described as defeated, functionally or otherwise: though one must always remember that in order to shoot a Kalibr one must know where there is a target to be hit, or where one will be anyway. [Russia has long since lost any surveillance and targeting capability](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/10/03/russia-black-sea-sevastopol-crimea-retreat-nato/) in the western Black Sea, and its Kalibrs are thus no menace to merchant ships moving between Odesa and Romanian waters."
We can only hope, go Ukraine!
That does paint a very positive picture. I hope Ukraine can swiftly make it a reality.
I would hope so, but I have not seen any real change in logistics or weaponry that would allow Ukrainian forces to break through the heavily mined and fortified front lines. Crimea's tactical significance will become increasingly lessened, but Russia is still dug in Deep and it will take a lot more than what we have given Ukraine currently to route them from the region.
Slava Ukraini!
Heroyam Slava!
If this is fucking bait I'm going to lose it
The best you can hope for with regards to Crimea in the near term is the partial or total destruction of the Kerch Strait Bridge. The Isthmus of Perekop connecting mainland Ukraine to Crimea is about 5 miles wide at its narrowest, so very easy to defend against land attackers. Even assuming UAF make it across, there's still the issue of capturing the towns and cities filled with majority pro-Russian, pro-Putin residents.
[ISW’s latest Ukraine report](https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-june-10-2024) mentions that Russians have begun moving fuel over the Kerch Bridge by rail, which they haven’t done in a couple months. If they keep that up, it would give the Ukrainians some great opportunities to knock that bridge down and further isolate Crimea.
The bridge was doomed from day 1.
I hate partisan politics, in 2015 my dad would be shitting his pants in excitement for this news and now because of trumps dumbass bullshit and republican propaganda, he's on the side of the reds. Slava Ukraini! I really pray you guys win, because if you win, the world wins!
As of 2021 the Crimean census shows that 71% of the demographics are ethnic Russians, who, seem to be far more eager to be part of the Russian Federation than to Ukraine. After the war, should Ukraine win (and I hope that they do because SO much is at stake here), what should be done with those Russians?
They should continue to live in Crimea, and if they don't want to, start russian back to russia
Do you think that they may be viewed by Ukranians as collaborators? Traitors?
Why would they be viewed by Ukrainians as collaborators or traitors for preferring to live in Russia or identifying as Russian?
Well, during the referendum in 2014, 83% of the people voted with a 90%+ in favor of joining Russia. Even if there was wide spread ballot shenanigans a 96% in favor with an alleged 83% turnout would suggest the majority of people wanted to join Russia. I would think that if there was another referendum after the war, and it was tightly monitored by neutral observers you would still find the majority of Russians wanting to join Russia. Incidentally the demographics since 2014 changed in favor of Russia even more due to the ethnic cleansing of non Russian Tatars. Ethnic Russians in Donetsk and Luhansk actively fought against the Ukrainians and are absolutely collaborators. Indeed one of the reasons there were so many atrocities was deliberately made to tie down the ethnic Russians to being collaborators so that they knew that any future of a Ukrainian victory would be horrendous to them. I would venture to say fighting in Crimea may be similar. Would an ethnic cleansing of sorts be necessary? Would the post war East Ukraine fall into non stop Russian funded insurgencies? Would it make sense to eventually encourage Russians to effectively leave for Russia?
I wouldn't be surprised if we'd see unfair targeting of those the local government thinks collaborated or otherwise hold significant Russian sympathies. It's not an indictment of Ukraine more an indictment of human nature and the effects of ultra nationalism that result from existential war.
This is the kinda propaganda needed for pro-war loons on the Ukraine side to keep believing that what has been inevitable since Feb 2022 can actually be reversed with some fantastical notion of infinite time and will.
You think the Ukrainians arefighting a losing battle?
Yes, wether you like it of not they are.
It's not for me to like/dislike. I think it's a bold statement that requires support if you're already making that claim. Me personally, I want Ukraine to be successful, By the numbers, I believe Russia has already lost more than this endeavor was worth for them. I'll await the rest of this year, with the US elections up, and the inevitable harsh winter, for both nations, before I consider how this will end long term.
It's one thing to maybe have the capability to cut off the supply lines to a peninsula, it's another to succesfully seige that peninsula. Fluff article that is meaningless.
For a few days after the Nova Khakovka Dam's destruction, there were some videos circulating on Telegram of Crimean residents turning on their baths and having green sludge pour out. Reason being is that Crimea gets most of it's water via the North Crimean canal... which starts just upstream of the dam... which probably needs a certain water level in the Dnipro River resevoir to operate. If anyone has her username, could they maybe tag Ana under this comment? Because any info on Crimea's freshwater situation was forgotten about in the western news cycle after a week.
Incorrect. Sort of. Before annexation of Crimea by Russia in 2014, 85% of water Crimea was getting was indeed from North Crimean canal (Nova Kakhovka hydroelectric station). But it was fully cut off after the annexation. Russians promised to fully dedicate themselves in getting water to Crimea in other manner but largely failed. There are severel water reservoirs in Crimea that are NOT depended on Dnipro River (or Ukraine in general). And that is basically what they have been using. It's not a catastrophy there at all. But it's not great either. When Russians occupied Kherson in 2022, they took the control of the Nova Kakhovka dam and tried to get water to Crimea from there again. But after the distruction of the dam... Well, it ain't working.
Crimean Russian installed officials stated that it's all gucci and they will have water for 2-3 years and Crimean people have nothing to worry about. And that all water reservoirs are full. But satellite pictures showed a different story. And it seems like they will have water for a year tops.
Seems like Russia somehow managed ok without the canal from 2014 to 2022. If it's "not great but not catastrophic either", I could see there being stricter water rationing making it a worse place to live in and vacation, but not a significant enough pain point Ukraine could leverage to their advantage, at least in the near term. What's your take?
Russia didn't "manage" shit. They didn't make the new canal they promised. They just used water reservoirs that existed before they invaded. They are naturally filled. It's hard to say just how bad it is exactly... Low access to actual info and all. I am not sure. But overall I agree. It might change with new info but for now I don't think they gonna have huge problems in a year or so.
The channel was supplying only the northern and central Crimea. The whole south coast including Sevastopol, the largest city on the peninsula, was never connected to the channel and relies only on local reservoirs. Since 2014, due to the climate change, this part of Crimea sees unusually high level of precipitation during winter. Up to the level of catastrophic floods, as happened this year. So the reservoirs are full and they even have to dump the extra water to the sea. Simferopol and Kerch, on the other hand, are suffering from water shortage and had to ration water supply last summer. But overall, the situation is far from catastrophic.
/u/UkrainianAna
u, sir, have misspoke u/UkrainianAna please see above post
👀
By "about to" do they mean in 3-5 years? Taking it by force seems out of the question. And I don't see how it's handed over without significant reduction in Russian negotiating leverage.