The geography that makes Crimea hard to invade facilitates a modern-day siege

Sunday, May 28th, 2023

Ukraine can isolate Crimea without a costly ground offensive:

Defending the Crimean Peninsula, which Russia invaded and annexed in 2014, has historically presented a quandary. A land invasion from the northwest — the direct route — must cross the narrow and easily defended Perekop isthmus between the peninsula and the mainland.

On the other hand, a hostile army can just as easily block communications between Crimea and the mainland. This would force Russia to supply the peninsula either by sea or by road and rail using the 11-mile Kerch Strait bridge on the eastern side of the peninsula, which connects Crimea with the Taman peninsula in southern Russia.

[…]

“The geography that makes Crimea hard to invade facilitates a modern-day siege,” Courtney and Savitz wrote. “All Russian movements by land must pass through one of two constrained corridors. The first entails traversing hundreds of miles of occupied territory, including areas relatively close to the front and crawling with hostile populations, saboteurs, and special forces. The final gauntlet is the isthmus, a target-rich place with minimal room for maneuver and within range of current Ukrainian weapons.”

That leaves the Black Sea route. Ideally, Ukraine would either launch an amphibious invasion of the peninsula — as Britain and France did in the Crimean War in 1854 — or starve out the Russians through a naval blockade.

[…]

“USVs are well-suited for networked swarm attacks, and relatively low-cost,” Courtney and Savitz wrote. “Their nascent designs can be modified to make them stealthier and harder to detect than most crewed vessels. Sinking a warship in a confined channel could create obstacles that would take weeks to clear, or longer if under fire.”

Comments

  1. Gavin Longmuir says:

    The Ukraine is effectively now occupied by US/NATO. The US government in particular is even paying the pensions of retired Ukrainians. As some European politicians have noted, the Ukraine would (will?) collapse within weeks if (when?) US government support stops.

    Given that reality, would Russia respond to a NATO siege of Crimea by nuking Kiev or by nuking Washington DC? If Russia did choose to nuke the DC Swamp, would many US taxpayers object?

  2. Roo_ster says:

    The Narrative is STRONG in Business Insider.

  3. Bob Sykes says:

    And, the US/NATO is losing the war. Its proxy army is being ground to hamburger.

    Ukraine, which reputedly had 40 to 45 million people in 1992, is now down to less than 20 million. The others, mostly young people and mostly male, left after independence and again after the US coup and yet again after the US led war began.

    The largest NATO air practice ever begins June 12th. This will entail some 220 aircraft (100 US) and 10,000 troops. There will be practice attacks on Russia all along its borders.

    At the same time, the USS Ford CBG and other NATO warships will conduct exercises off the Norwegian coast above the Arctic Circle.

    There will also be a NATO summit in Vilnius on July 11/12.

    So, with the US/NATO engaging Russia in a proxy war in Ukraine, our leaders choose to conduct egregiously provocative maneuvers right up to Russian territory. We have the most wantonly reckless leadership in world history.

    And, of course, they keep the Taiwan pot boiling, too.

  4. McChuck says:

    “We have the most wantonly reckless leadership in world history.”

    They’re not reckless. They know exactly what they are doing. You must understand that their real goal is the destruction of Western Civilization. Encouraging tens of millions of immigrants to invade our nations is part and parcel of this.

  5. Jim says:

    For the first twelve months of the proxy war between the United State and the United State’s natural greatest ally, Russia, I benefited greatly in that the U.S. nomenklatura completely forgot its mad, frothing-at-the-mouth maskcraze and vaxlust as it pivoted in one clean, cool motion to its new grand program of swiftly, predatorily, and ostentatiously completely failing to exercise any kind of soft power whatsoever on Putinsland.

    For this I thank Mr. President Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin profusely, for this one achievement alone a great patriot and friend to the American peoples, long may he live. Now, however, fifteen months later, I am beginning to feel some sting from his special military operation in the Ukraine of Russia. Friends, when I am obliged to speak with customer-service drones of more than one financial megacorporation, I now notice a deeply disturbing trend, namely, that I am repeatedly greeted—really, assailed—by voices wielding a bizarre, unintelligible, and ugly, odious accent. Friends, they sound just like Undersecretary Victoria Nüland’s favorite back-home meatpuppet-mouthpiece. Friends, I think that this accent is Ukrainian in origin.

    That’s why I’m announcing my officially “being so over it” vis–à-vis this little geopolitical spat. It has to end. Send back the Ukrainians. Bring back the full-spectrum vaxcraze and masklust. Let’s go full-bore once again; we have to bring it back. Global travel restrictions; infinity money-printer insanity. Literal concentration camps in Australia; inconceivable bankster fuckery in Canada. Force-mask the wagie; force-vax the wagie. I would rather have a big, thick, veiny, black mask strapped permanently to every service- and office-worker’s face than suffer another one of these freaks’ eldritch resonances on the cellphone telephone.

    This sort of thing is why the German people voted Hitler ’32.

  6. VXXC says:

    Ukraine can launch an amphibious operation….

    :) LOL

    Mein Furher Steiner…Steiner…

    This is Hitler 45, Hell it’s worse. He had a great army for a while. This is Luxembourg-conquers-France level narrative.

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