Target: Crimea
Partisans are mobilizing, and Russians are trying to sell their holiday homes — as fear grows that the war is closing in on the peninsula.
In conversations via secure communications, people in Crimea describe growing tension across the Black Sea peninsula as they increasingly expect the advent of direct hostilities. They say saboteur and partisan groups are now readying in the territory, which was illegally annexed by Russia in 2014.
Frustration and panic are surging, over everything from conscription to runaway prices. One person told of anger over an inability to secure hospital places thanks to the numbers of Russian wounded brought in from the fronts, while another said that the fretful Russian elite were trying to sell their glitzy holiday homes, but were finding no buyers.
When Vladimir Putin launched his all-out invasion of Ukraine in February, few people expected Ukrainian forces would nine months later be threatening to reclaim Crimea. That no longer feels like a military impossibility, however, after Kyiv’s well-organized troops showed that they could drive out Russian forces in offensive operations around Kharkiv in northeastern Ukraine and Kherson in the south.
Tamila Tasheva, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s permanent representative in Crimea, has high hopes the peninsula will end up back in Ukrainian hands. “Yes, of course, it is entirely possible we will get Crimea back,” she told POLITICO.
“Our goal is the return of all our territory, which of course includes Crimea,” she said in her office in Kyiv. A 37-year-old Crimean Tatar, whose family lives on the peninsula, Tasheva is busy preparing plans for what happens after Crimea is “de-occupied” and is drafting a legal framework to cope with complex issues of transitional justice that will arise. She says while Kyiv would prefer the peninsula to be handed back without a fight, “a military way may be the only solution.”
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