Can Ukraine liberate Crimea?

The Kyiv government has stressed all along that unless Crimea is liberated from its Russian occupiers there can be no deal with Moscow. While I can understand why President Zelensky and his top advisers are saying this, the reality is that unless the West supplies Ukraine with long-range (300 miles at least) rockets and missiles and all 300 of the tanks Zelensky says he needs, there is no chance that the Russian occupying forces can be driven out of the Crimean peninsula. They have been there since 2014 and have thousands of troops in well-entrenched positions. With fighting going on throughout the eastern Donbas region, Ukraine would simply not have the troop power, let alone the firepower, to drive the Russians out of Crimea. Four senior Pentagon officias effectively said as much in a supposedly classified briefing to the House armed services committee today, and General Mark Milley, chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, has said the same thing in the past. But Crimea is going to be one of the major sticking points if ever Kyiv and Moscow get together for negotiations to end the war. Zelensky wants Crimea back, and Putin will never give it up. Never. So even if the fighting stops in Donbas, which seems highly unlikely, Crimea would remain a huge obstruction to peace. Crimea was seized in 2014 while the rest of the world effectively looked on. Putin got away with it because no one in the West thought he would do it, and when he did, decided there was nothing that could be done apart from impose sanctions. Putin laughed his head off. So the big question is: will Zelensky relent and leave Crimea in Russian hands if he gets a negotiated settlement to end the war without losing the whole of the Donbas region? The question is relevant but also fairly pointless. Right now we are far away from any sort of negotiated deal. The only talk these days is how Putin must be defeated. There is a mighty Russian offensive in the making at the moment and we will have to see how that progresses before even contemplating the future of Crimea. But it's not going to go away. Indeed there could be another war altogether that focuses just on Crimea. Some of the talk in Congress is that the war must come to an end this summer. I really do think that's hopelessly optimistic and unrealistic at the same time. And Crimea is one of the reasons for my pessimism.