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Crimea was the opening shot in Russia’s war against Ukraine. The region was snatched at the country’s most vulnerable moment, just after a popular revolt and without a functioning government. Twelve years on, however, it is Ukraine that holds the stronger position—and Kyiv now intends to turn the tables on the Kremlin. Suddenly, Crimea could change the fate of the war.
Unless Russia very quickly finds a response, the only way the Kremlin keeps Crimea is to sue for peace—and even that option is closing.
The Imperial Bug
To see why Crimea can decide the war, we first have to understand two things about it: what it means to Russia, and what it takes to hold the peninsula. Unlike other countries, where national purpose now rests on the prosperity of a people and its cultural and scientific achievements, Russia never moved beyond empire. Its most prolific leaders—Peter I and Catherine II—were named “the Great” for conquering new territory. Sevastopol has been the home of the Black Sea fleet since Empress Catherine’s reign. It is where the Crimean War was fought and where the Soviet Union’s most celebrated siege took place in the Second World War. In 2014, Putin justified the annexation by calling Crimea “sacred land” and invoking Chersonesus, where Vladimir of Kyiv was baptised—a civilisational claim.
However, Crimea was never Russian land. Its indigenous people are the Crimean Tatars, a Turkic people with their own language and culture. After Catherine annexed the peninsula in 1783, Russia set about cleansing them from it; a century and a half later, in May 1944, Stalin deported almost the entire Tatar population to Central Asia and resettled Crimea with Russians and some Ukrainians. The Tatars were allowed back only as the USSR collapsed, and since 2014 they have been persecuted again—their language and culture suppressed, their literature banned under extremism laws, the people themselves jailed on fabricated terrorism charges.
Colonial Myth and the Logistical Reality
After Stalin’s death in 1953, Khrushchev attempted various reforms, including redrawing internal borders. In 1954, Crimea was handed to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. At the time the change was purely administrative—it was all the USSR. When the Union collapsed, that internal border became an international one.
The transfer made logistical sense. Crimea has limited resources of its own. Everything it needs to sustain modern life, water included, was supplied from the mainland—which was Ukraine. Delivering it within one administrative district and budget was simpler than routing it around several.
In every war fought over Crimea across the centuries, no power has held it without also holding the mainland. Without the supply routes, those defending the peninsula from within invariably failed and abandoned it. In the Crimean War, the Russians held Sevastopol for eleven months, then gave up the city once their supply ran out, scuttling their own fleet as they left. In 1944, the Germans lost the peninsula the same way, once the Red Army cut them off and trapped them against the sea. This is why Crimea could not sit within Russia and had to belong to Ukraine.
As a result, Russia built a land corridor to Crimea along the Azov coast. The failed Ukrainian counteroffensive of 2023 was meant to take back that corridor and with it liberate Crimea. When it did not, Ukraine settled in for the long game.
Plans Within Plans
Two strategic decisions explain the situation in Crimea. First, early in the war Ukraine poured a large share of its limited resources into unmanned forces and drone technology. Second, Kyiv pushed weapons decisions down to unit level and gamified combat. Units choose their own weapons by task and performance; a weapon that is not good enough is not picked, which drives development without the kickbacks and cronyism of central procurement. And every kill now earns points to spend on more weapons.
This in turn let Ukraine pursue a long-term plan to destroy Russian front-line and rear logistics.
As early as the end of 2022, Ukraine began a campaign against Russian air defence. Unlike the “genocide against the artillery,” as Russian war bloggers called it, this one was not flashy, and it took a few years to notice. Where the radars and systems destroyed in Crimea—the S-400s, the Pantsirs, the Tors—had once been replaced, by 2026 their numbers had finally shrunk. And because Ukraine could now reach Moscow, what remained was sent to reinforce the defenses around the capital rather than to replace the dwindling cover over Crimea.
As the drone programme and the system behind it matured, Ukraine began striking deep inside Russia, with oil storage and fuel production particular targets. The resulting shortage is spreading slowly across Russia and is acute in the border regions and the occupied parts of Ukraine.
Alongside the long-range strikes, Ukraine has built a fierce mid-range capability reaching 150 to 200 km behind the front—essentially the whole logistics path. Russia’s capability here has not improved. The advantage is considerable: it has become almost impossible to supply the front with anything, fuel above all. Ukraine has meticulously destroyed the rail and road links running through the occupied territories along the Azov coast.
Every land route in and out of Crimea is now inoperable or severely disrupted, leaving the Kerch bridge as the only way to supply it—and the obvious next target.
Ukraine has also struck the thermal plants and the cables carrying electricity to Crimea. Before the annexation, the peninsula drew power from the Ukrainian grid and water through the North Crimean Canal. In 2019, Russia built two thermal plants to replace the grid, but they run on gas piped from Russia—and that supply, too, has now been interrupted by Ukraine. Planned blackouts are already in place in Sevastopol.
Decay and Acceleration
Ukraine’s upper hand rests on several things at once. Even if Russia developed its own mid-range strike capability—difficult, for a centralized and corrupt system that does not reward ingenuity—that would not conjure back the air defence destroyed over Crimea, nor rebuild the bridges and railways leading to it. Although Russia can continue the war for a while, it cannot keep Crimea supplied, nor easily improve its defenses. Quite the opposite: the peak of its defensibility has passed, and from here it will only worsen. On their own, none of these developments would have been catastrophic for the Kremlin. Together, they have created a situation in which too many things are happening at once. Meanwhile, Ukraine is only gaining strength: its defence industry is among the fastest developing in the world, and it has secured EU funding for the next two years.
Without fuel, the Russian military cannot move, cannot run the generators that power its command posts, and cannot keep its drones in the air. The Dnepr Grouping holding the line in Zaporizhzhia and Kherson will run out of supplies and become sitting ducks, exactly as in 2022, when relentless strikes on Russian logistics made the right bank of the Dnipro untenable and forced the retreat from Kherson. Crimea will then become the poster child of the modern blockade.
If Russia cannot find an answer to Ukrainian drone advances (soon to be joined by ballistic missiles) that its air defences are ill-equipped to stop; cannot find alternative supply routes to Crimea and the territories around it; and cannot pause an economic collapse driven by record military spending, falling energy revenue, and shortages of investment and manpower—then it cannot sustain its forces in Crimea and the areas around it. Without supplies, the Russian army must withdraw or be destroyed where it stands.
The Irresistible Force and the Immovable Object
In these circumstances, the only way the Kremlin keeps Crimea is if Kyiv stops attacking it. Under the Biden administration, Ukraine depended heavily on U.S. supplies—and therefore on American goodwill. Donald Trump, having stopped all aid and sold weapons to Ukraine only through the NATO-backed Prioritised Ukraine Requirements List program, under which allies buy U.S. weapons for Ukraine, now has very little leverage. Washington can withhold the air defence missiles, but it would have to own the resulting civilian death toll, and even then, it would not touch Ukraine’s offensive capabilities.
Before the change of administration in Washington, Ukraine insisted on ending the war only when all its territory was liberated. After Trump returned to power, it reluctantly agreed to halt the fighting along the current battle lines. Not many remember that this was a compromise on Ukraine’s part—and one that bore no fruit. The longer Ukraine degrades Russian logistics around Crimea, the less reason it has to offer any compromise at all.
At some stage, Ukraine will change the offer from stopping at the battle lines to letting the remaining troops flee Crimea. If Russia wants to keep Crimea—for however long—it must give up its claim to the rest of Ukraine and stop the war while Ukraine still allows it to. That would be the prudent thing to do. Then again, if Russia acted prudently, it would never have invaded Ukraine in the first place.
Ines Burrell is a geopolitical analyst and political risk consultant based in the UK. Born in the Baltics, with a degree in International Relations from the University of Exeter, she writes and gives live commentary on European security and Russia.
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