FROM OUR REPORTER
KIEV – tear down the Kerch Bridge, conquer the entire peninsula and drive the Russian Black Sea Fleet from its historical base in Sevastopol; then expel the Russians who arrived in the last 9 years, confiscate their possessions to distribute to the Ukrainians who left in 2014, instead of submitting to Putin: since yesterday the plans of the Kiev government to liberate Crimea have become public. Not that they were unknown, they were talked about unofficially for months, albeit with different accents, but Oleksiy Danilov’s decision to publish them with numerous details makes them an integral part of the Zelenskyi government’s military and political program, that, among other things, it seems to be about to start the “spring offensive” that has already been broadcast.
Danilov is in fact the secretary of the National Security Council, a central figure in the military apparatus. It is not for nothing that his program also addresses the punishment of the Russian “collaborators” during the occupation. Yesterday’s difficult phone call between Antony Blinken and Sergey Lavrov fits into this framework dictated by weapons. The US Secretary of State crashed into the rubber wall of his Russian counterpart when he called for the immediate release of Evan Gershkovich, the American Wall Street Journal reporter who is in jail in Moscow on espionage charges. Lavrov called the pressure on the case from the US and foreign press “unacceptable” and reiterated that “the Russian court will decide.”
The “Crimean Plan” has profound implications for the conflict. It should be remembered that the peninsula was occupied by the Russians in 2014: back then, the autonomous republics of Donetsk and Lugansk were jointly administered by the Kremlin with local pro-Russians, but Putin was happy to immediately extend full Russian sovereignty to Crimea, which every nationalist of his rank as an integral part of the “Russkiy Mir” against the “betrayal” of the Soviet leaders in 1954 when they decided to annex it to Ukraine (then part of the USSR). If Putin fears losing it, he could make the nuclear threat again.
But the situation is even more complicated: After the invasion, Zelenskyy asked Putin for face-to-face meetings and proposed a peace plan that would see a Russian withdrawal to the original borders in exchange for a “15-year freeze” of the status quo in Donbass and Crimea . Kyiv indicated that it accepted the Russification of the territories it lost in 2014. But Putin, outraged, refused, and guns have ruled ever since. Since June, Ukrainian drones have begun attacking Russian positions and ships on the peninsula. On October 8, an explosion attributed to Ukrainians blocked traffic on the Kerch Bridge for more than four months: a twenty-kilometer-long vital artery that has linked the disputed peninsula with Russian territory since 2018. Since then, the bridge has been in the sights of the Ukrainians, who are now making total Russian withdrawal from Crimea a condition for negotiations.