Nation revives dream of retaking Crimea
ODESA, UKRAINE » Beneath a chill, low-lying fog, the Black Sea has gone winter-gray. The craggy coast of Crimea, illegally seized from Ukraine by Russia nearly nine years ago, lies far from this southern stretch of seashore. Yet, to many here, the strategic peninsula suddenly seems tantalizingly close.
Ukraine’s recapture this month of Kherson, a provincial capital to the north of Crimea, has revived longtime hopes of somehow regaining control of the Massachusetts-sized peninsula, which the government in Kyiv and most of the world still considers part of Ukraine.
Long-range weaponry that Ukraine does not possess would be crucial to such an effort, and Moscow has tried to make clear that attacks on its forces in Crimea, including the key warmwater port of Sevastopol, amount to crossing an explosive tripwire. Even so, the fate of the peninsula, home to 2.4 million people, is increasingly part of the wartime discourse.
“Kherson changed things,” said Alexander Babich, a Ukrainian local historian in the Black Sea port of Odesa. “Now people say, ‘On to Crimea!’”
Even prior to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which is about to enter a 10th grinding month, Crimea, a coveted prize for centuries, changing hands again and again, has been a lodestar for both sides in this war.
Russian President Vladimir
Putin often harks back to the peninsula’s imperial history, painting it as an integral part of the Russian world. That construct, supposedly based on shared Slavic culture, is in turn presented by the Kremlin as an overarching pretext for trying to subdue all Ukraine, a onetime Soviet republic that has been a sovereign nation for more than three decades.
As the war drags on, Ukrainians have scant patience for Russian nostalgia over symbols of empire.
They shrugged when Moscow-backed officials in then-occupied Kherson made off with the bones of the 18th century princely Russian general Grigory Potemkin, revered by Russians for his role in annexing Crimea from Ottoman Turks in 1783. In Odesa, a statue of Potemkin’s lover, Empress Catherine II, is boarded over and set for removal.
Heart of conflict
Many here argue that a less-than-resolute world reaction to Russia’s seizure of the peninsula in 2014 helped set the stage for Putin’s invasion this year. Western nations, including the United States, imposed sanctions and denounced Crimea’s annexation at the time, but ruled out a military response.
Now, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has added the return of Crimea to his list of war goals, along with driving Russian forces back to pre-February positions and regaining control of the other four mainland provinces sham-annexed by Putin in late September.
Putin is betting heavily on Western war-weariness increasing in coming months, especially among energy-pinched European allies. If Zelenskyy eventually faces calls to consider territorial concessions to end the conflict, Crimea’s status could be a key diplomatic pressure point.
The Russian leader has already shown his fury over challenges to Moscow’s dominion over Crimea, particularly last month’s spectacular attack on the Kerch Bridge to the Russian mainland, a 12-mile span that Putin personally inaugurated in 2018.
Ukraine has not formally claimed responsibility for the massive Oct. 8 explosion that damaged the bridge’s roadway and rail line, but days later, Russian forces embarked on a campaign to destroy Ukraine’s civilian power infrastructure, employing language that hinted at payback. The biggest missile barrages of the war have lately targeted Kyiv and other cities, plunging millions into cold and darkness.
With some 40% of the nation’s electric grid knocked offline, Ukrainian authorities have begun helping people in recently liberated parts of the country’s south, where retreating Russian troops wrecked energy facilities, depart voluntarily to avoid further straining the faltering power supply. Last month, the municipal government in Kyiv raised the drastic possibility of evacuating the capital if the city’s electrical capability were to break down.