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Kyiv, recently armed with deep-strike missiles, seeks to degrade Russian functions on the peninsula, airfields, air defenses and logistics centers.
By Marc Santora
Reporting from Odessa, Ukraine
In the transparent evening sky over the Odessa coast, the faint glow of missiles crosses the Black Sea.
For much of the war, it was a one-way traffic: Russia took the occupied Crimean peninsula first as a launching pad for its full-scale invasion and then as a starting point for its regime’s aerial bombardments.
Ukraine, now armed with American-made precision missiles, is able for the first time to succeed in each and every corner of Crimea, and the missiles fly in both directions.
It’s a strategic development as Kyiv seeks to raise prices for Russian occupation forces that have long used the peninsula as a base of operations off Ukraine’s southern coast.
While unlikely to have much effect on the front line, Ukraine’s crusade with the long-range edition of the army’s tactical missile systems, known as ATACMS, appears poised to force the Kremlin to make potentially complicated choices about where to deploy some of its maximum power. missiles, valuable air defenses, and critical army infrastructure.
At the NATO summit in Washington last week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the Crimean crusade would have a limited effect as long as Moscow can move its bombers to the protection of air bases in central Russia. He suggested to Biden’s leadership that it lift restrictions so that Kyiv can expand its movements deep into Russia.
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