US and UK make case for Ukraine retaking Crimea: ‘We need to finish this job’
Joel Gehrke
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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s aspiration to liberate all Russian-occupied territory has received a full-throated endorsement from United States and British officials amid a wider transatlantic debate about outcomes of the war in Ukraine.
“It’s very important that Ukraine win this war,” a senior State Department official told reporters Wednesday. “And by ‘win,’ I mean as President Biden said, Russians leave all of Ukraine.”
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President Joe Biden has denounced Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aggression through the Kremlin’s campaign to overthrow the Ukrainian government, but the White House nonetheless has been perceived as “afraid of winning.” Yet Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s team has an opposite reputation for proposing more extensive and effective means of support to Ukraine, for moral and geopolitical reasons.
“We need to finish this job,” the senior State Department official said. “It’s in our fundamental interest to see and have Ukraine maintain its territorial integrity and for Europe to maintain its stability as our largest trading partner … [and] the most important partner, in terms of our projection of our power and our influence around the world, on global issues that span much broader than Europe.”
That identification of Ukraine’s territorial integrity with key U.S. geopolitical priorities would seem to imply a hardened determination to help Kyiv regain control over Crimea, which Putin annexed at the beginning of the war in 2014. The specter of a showdown over that peninsula has loomed over transatlantic debates about war aims, as many Western officials have feared that Putin would use nuclear weapons to retain Crimea, the traditional headquarters of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, but even those doubts are fading, according to the United Kingdom’s top diplomat in Ukraine.
“Of course, Russia, and especially Putin, see Crimea as critically important to their territory. But it’s quite evident that it’s part of Ukraine,” British Ambassador Melinda Simmons, who is concluding a four-year tenure as London’s lead envoy in Kyiv, told BBC Ukraine in an interview published Wednesday. “When the international community talks about Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk, Luhansk, and Crimea — it has all blended now in the context of reclaiming their sovereign territories. So, what sense is there in the so-called special status for Crimea?”
That assessment, if true, would reflect a shift in international attitudes, even among Ukraine’s staunchest supporters. Blinken reportedly suggested in February that “a Ukrainian attempt to retake Crimea would be a red line for Vladimir Putin,” and even former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, one of the biggest proponents of NATO aid to Ukraine, during and after his tenure in 10 Downing Street, has said that “Crimea is a slightly separate issue” from other occupied territory.
“That’s why I mentioned it in my farewell speech — perhaps we’ll see each other in Crimea,” Simmons said. “In my opinion, it’s just as likely as meeting in Zaporizhzhia or Kherson Oblast.”
She offered that projection in the face of gathering doubts about the prospects of the Ukrainian counteroffensive, which has progressed more slowly than officials in Kyiv or capitals around Europe had hoped. And Ukrainian officials are making their own effort to vindicate such confidence, including through a major drone attack on multiple military sites in Russia and an intensifying drive to break through Russian lines in Zaporizhzhia, one of the partially occupied Ukrainian regions that Russia seized in order to form a land bridge from sovereign Russian territory to Crimea.
“Having entrenched on the flanks of Robotyne, we are opening the way to Tokmak and, eventually, Melitopol and the administrative border with Crimea,” Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said Wednesday.
Some private-sector intelligence analysts credited Ukraine with breaking through “the first Russian main defensive line” on Wednesday, but other prominent analysts are withholding judgment.
“Ukrainian forces very well may have breached it, but we need more evidence,” George Barros, the Institute for the Study of War’s team lead on geospatial intelligence, wrote on social media. “Ukrainian forces have not necessarily penetrated the final component of the line — the Russian fighting positions near Verbove … I do think the Ukrainians will breach this line, including the tri-layered defense, in earnest with heavy equipment in the near future.”
The counteroffensive plays a prominent role in Blinken’s stated determination to empower Ukrainian officials to negotiate from a position of strength, rather than greenlight any ceasefire that would allow Putin “to consolidate control over the territory he’s seized, and then rest, re-arm, and re-attack.” The slow pace of the counteroffensive has raised the uncomfortable possibility that Ukraine might have “to give up territory” as part of a wider deal, though the U.S. and British officials refused to engage in such talk this week.
“The U.K. is helping Ukraine regain its territorial integrity,” said Simmons, the British ambassador. “That’s exactly what we’re doing.”
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And Blinken’s subordinate characterized the current campaign as merely “the latest counteroffensive” against Putin’s “systematic approach to eradicate a nation.
“It’s the clearest black-and-white, good-and-bad, good-and-evil, I would say, reality that I’ve ever seen in my entire career,” the senior State Department official said.