Continued:
A D-Day-style amphibious assault to liberate Crimea remains inconceivable. But, says Sir Lawrence Freedman, a British strategist, that is the wrong way to look at it. Crimea is a weak point for Russia. It has too much there to defend, and it is the best way for Ukraine to put real pressure on Mr Putin in order to extract concessions in the future. Nico Lange, a former adviser to the German defence ministry, agrees: “Ukraine’s campaign is a mixture of a military and political strategy. Politically, it is Russia’s most vital asset; but it is also very vulnerable.” What Ukraine is attempting to do is to make Crimea a liability rather than an asset for Mr Putin. The aim is to isolate it and in doing so to push Russian air and sea forces away from southern Ukraine and strangle it as a logistics hub.
Ukraine has already demonstrated the ability of British- and French-supplied Storm Shadow and scalp cruise missiles, and its own cleverly designed homemade maritime drones, to hit Russian warships, particularly the big Ropucha landing vessels used as military transports, most of which have been destroyed. Ukrainian drones and missiles may have taken out of action as much as half of the previously formidable Black Sea Fleet. Almost all of what remains has been forced to relocate from Sevastopol to the port of Novorossiysk, over 300km away on the Russian mainland. Novorossiysk itself came under attack from both marine and aerial drones on May 17th. A railway station and a power-generation plant as well as the naval base were hit.
But now Ukraine is using a deadly combination of atacms and increasingly sophisticated drones to systematically degrade Russian air defences in Crimea, hit air-bases from which Russian interceptors fly and strike critical logistics and economic targets. Sir Lawrence says that the focus on crippling Russia’s air-defence network may also be part of the preparation for the imminent arrival of the first batches of F-16 fighter jets from Europe.
On April 17th an atacms strike on Dzhankoi airbase in the north-east of Crimea damaged helicopters, an S-400 battery and a command-and-control centre. A month later, on the evening of May 15th, a large-scale atacms strike on an airbase at Belbek near Sevastopol destroyed four planes as well as an S-400 air-defence radar and at least two launchers. The attack, which comprised about ten missiles each carrying 300 bomblets, caused massive fires, possibly set off by an exploding fuel depot and stored air-to-air missiles.
The following evening Belbek was hit again, an indication that Ukraine has at its disposal rather more than the 100 or so atacms thought to have been donated. In what is becoming almost a nightly occurrence, two Russian patrol boats were destroyed on May 30th and two transport ferries were damaged near the Kerch Bridge in separate drone strikes that saw Russian aircraft scrambled to little effect.
Significantly, Russia’s much-vaunted and very expensive S-400 air-defence system has been found wanting. Mr Lange says the Ukrainians are using decoy drones to make the Russians light up their radars and reveal their positions. The targeting data is immediately fed to the atacms launch crews. Within six minutes the missiles, virtually undetectable because of their speed and low radar cross-section, are hitting their targets. General Hodges notes that the S-400s are also vulnerable to sabotage by Ukrainian special forces operating inside Crimea. Each battery costs about $200m, and they are not easily replaceable.
The general says that Russian forces have “no place to hide”. With the help of satellite and aerial reconnaissance provided by nato allies, their own deep knowledge of the territory, and covert forces on the ground, nothing can move in Crimea without the Ukrainians knowing about it. With the arrival of the atacms and the increasing sophistication of their own drones, every square metre of the peninsula is in range, including time-sensitive targets such as aircraft and equipment convoys moving by road or rail.
General Hodges is confident that the Ukrainians will “take down the Kerch Bridge when they are ready”. However, a potentially greater challenge will be disrupting the new improved railway line running along the Azov Sea from Rostov through the southern Ukrainian cities of Mariupol and Berdiansk down into Crimea. Dmitry Pletenchuk, a spokesman for Ukraine’s southern military command, says: “The railway along the land corridor is recognition on the part of the Russian occupiers that the Crimean [Kerch] Bridge is doomed. They are looking for a way to hedge their bets because they are aware that sooner or later, they will have a problem.”
An early test of the wider strategic success of Ukraine’s campaign in Crimea could come this summer when Russian holidaymakers normally flock across the Kerch Bridge to resorts on the peninsula. If they decide otherwise, says Ben Barry of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a think-tank, it will be a bad omen for Mr Putin. Crimea is heavily dependent on the tourist industry, and bookings last year were down by nearly a half. “Crimea”, he says, “has been turned from being a prestige project to a drain on Russian resources.” ?
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The Economist thinks the tide may have turned:
Good news, at last, from Ukraine. The approval in April of the Biden administration’s $61bn military-support package, after six months of Congressional delay, is having an impact. In particular, the arrival of atacms ballistic missiles, with a range of 300km, means that Ukraine can now hit any target in Russian-occupied Crimea, with deadly effect.
In the past week, the Russian offensive in the north-east against Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second city, also appears to have lost momentum. Of potentially even greater significance, President Joe Biden, under pressure from a growing chorus of European allies, on May 30th eased the restrictions on American weapons being used against military targets on Russian soil, imposed because of overblown fears about Russian nuclear escalation. The Ukrainians are now to be allowed to use some American kit to hit Russian forces on the other side of the border attacking or preparing to attack Kharkiv. It is not clear whether this would include Russian tactical aircraft launching glide-bomb attacks of the kind that killed at least 18 people in a Kharkiv hardware shop on May 25th.
However, to the exasperation of the Ukrainians, Mr Biden has still to lift his ban on hitting targets elsewhere in Russia. For an indication of what Ukraine might achieve if it no longer had to fight with one hand tied behind its back, the effectiveness of its campaign in Crimea shows the way. According to Ben Hodges, a former commander of American forces in Europe and a senior adviser to nato on logistics, the Ukrainians are “systematically in the process of making Ukraine uninhabitable for Russian forces”.
That would be a huge strategic prize for Ukraine. Ever since the reign of Catherine the Great, Russians have regarded Crimea as militarily important. Vladimir Putin saw Crimea, linked to the mainland by the Kerch Bridge since 2018, as an unsinkable aircraft-carrier, where logistics hubs, air-bases and the Black Sea Fleet, operating out of Sevastopol, could be used to dominate the south of Ukraine, close off Ukraine’