The cost has been unbearable. But the deep sacrifices and hard-won battlefield successes of the people of Ukraine have already dealt an epic moral and strategic blow to the Kremlin. Now a Russian military defeat may be on the horizon, provided the West continues to give Ukraine the support it needs.
Whenever genuine peace talks begin, there’s little doubt that Crimea will feature high on the agenda. Ukraine’s Black Sea peninsula is the ground zero of Russia’s current war of aggression. Since its seizure by Vladimir Putin’s troops in 2014, Crimea has been flooded with weapons, disinformation and fear. Its residents have been cut off from the rest of Ukraine and the wider world.
There had been a tendency in the West to look away from this Russian occupation of Crimea and shrug our shoulders. But with Ukrainian forces now staging a dogged counteroffensive and striking military targets inside Crimea, there seems to be precious little indifference today. Some pundits are calling on Kyiv to back down and dangle Crimea as a pawn in a future settlement with Russia. Amateur mediators like Elon Musk casually ponder surrendering the peninsula to Putin and calling it a day.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member