How many chances has Ukraine to retake Crimea?

Two years after the Russian invasion of the peninsula and its subsequent annexation, in Kiev there is still who think that Ukraine could take it back, by force if necessary. The fact that any military action would be seen by Russia as territorial aggression, and that the absolute majority of the population doesn’t even want to hear about Ukraine, should be enough to leave it at that now. But it is not going this way.

When the EuroNews reporter asked Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, during Conference on Security in Munich, if Moscow intends to return Crimea, he has not broken down. “The thing is not even in question,” he said. It is difficult to say what’s odder, if the question by Isabelle Kumar or that Medvedev has managed to stay serious as he answered.
The fact is that, seen from Moscow, the “return” (obrazovanje) of Crimea in the womb of the great motherland Russia repairs a wrong and puts an end to a case still pending. The “return”, in short, excludes the possibility of a “re-return.”
But on the other side of the mainland where the peninsula is attacked, the point of view is completely opposite. The Crimea is a problem opened with the Russian annexation, and the question of the return is part of the political rhetoric, between the nationalist and populist.

Reconquest

“We are training some guys with the help of Crimean Tatar activists in Ukraine. We are working on a project that will prepare us to regain Crimea,” the Ukrainian prime minister, Arsen Avakov, said a few days ago. “We need a new army, a new National Guard, and this is what the government of Ukraine is working on right now. We must restore all of this, and then, with enough will, Crimea will be ours,” he added.
A few months ago, the president Poroshenko said something similar, showing the annexation still hurts. “Every day and every moment, we will do everything to return Crimea to Ukraine.” What exactly he meant by “everything”, is unknown. But it does not seem to rule out the use of force.
Now, how armed intervention – by the Ukrainian army or any other force – to regain Crimea, home of some 29,000 troops, is an unrealistic option is easily imaginable. In addition, the strategy implemented in recent months by some extremist groups, and possibly approved by Kiev, to isolate the peninsula with roadblocks or sabotaging power lines, seems not effective. According to a poll by the VTsIOM center, 93 percent of Crimeans prefer to suffer power shortage, until the peninsula will not be connected to the Russian electricity network, rather than continuing to depend on Ukraine.

Secret meeting

It can be useful to review how the events took place in 2014 to figure out the feasibility of a military force intervention. A few days ago, Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council has published a secret transcript of the emergency meeting of the government held on the days of the arrival of “little green men”. While it was clear to everyone that the Russian armed forces had already a boot on the soil and were ready to do anything to take Crimea, the then Minister of Defense Ihor Tenyukh – like everyone else, in office for a couple of weeks – summed up the situation in a nutshell. “We can send our troops there, but it won’t solve the problem of Crimea. We will simply get them killed there.”
Arseniy Yatsenyuk, already Prime Minister, – opposing to the proposal of acting President Turchynov, who wanted martial law – chose a political solution of the issue. Perhaps he hoped the West would help, and the Budapest Memorandum, by which the United States, UK and France in 1994 had pledged to guarantee the territorial integrity of Ukraine in exchange for the dismantling of its nuclear arsenal, would apply. We know what happened next.
Nothing suggests that two years later things have changed.

@daniloeliatweet