Ukraine's Crimea attacks seen as key to counter-offensive against RussiaThis week saw spectacular Ukrainian attacks on the Crimean Peninsula, hitting Russian warships and missiles.
Estimates of the damage done ran into billions of pounds and raised the question: is Ukraine getting ready to retake Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014?
Crimea is a Russian fortress, so it is important not to get carried away.
"The strategy has two main goals," says Oleksandr Musiienko, from Kyiv's Centre for Military and Legal Studies.
"To establish dominance in the north-western Black Sea and to weaken Russian logistical opportunities for their defence lines in the south, near Tokmak and Melitopol."
In other words, operations in Crimea go hand-in-glove with Ukraine's counter-offensive in the south.
"They depend on each other," Musiienko says.
Let's look at Ukraine's recent successes in Crimea.
On Wednesday, long-range cruise missiles, supplied by the UK and France, dealt a heavy blow to Russia's much-vaunted Black Sea fleet at its home port of Sevastopol.
On Friday, Britain's Ministry of Defence said a large amphibious landing ship, the Minsk, had "almost certainly been functionally destroyed".
Next to it, one of Russia's Kilo class diesel-electric submarines, the Rostov-on-Don - used to launch Kalibr cruise missiles hundreds of miles into Ukraine - had "likely suffered catastrophic damage".
Perhaps equally importantly the dry docks - vital for maintenance of the entire Black Sea fleet - would likely be out of use "for many months", the ministry said.
On Saturday, Ukraine offered tantalising new details.
It said special forces had played a key role, using boats and an unspecified "underwater delivery means" to get ashore, before using "special technical assets" to help identify and target the vessels.
But with the fires barely out in Sevastopol there were more dramatic night-time explosions as Ukraine blew up one of Russia's most modern air defence systems, an S-400, around 40 miles (64km) north at Yevpatoria.
This was another sophisticated operation that used a combination of drones and Ukrainian-made Neptune missiles to confuse and destroy a key component of Russia's air defences on the Crimean Peninsula.
A significant side note: Russian attempts to use exactly this technique over Kyiv have generally failed, largely thanks to the presence of US Patriot interceptor missiles.
Thursday was the second time in less than a month that Ukraine has knocked out an S-400 surface-to-air missile system on the peninsula.
On 23 August, at Olenivka, on the western tip of the Tarkhankut Peninsula, Ukraine managed to destroy another launcher and a nearby radar station.
Russia was thought to have not more than six S-400 launchers in Crimea. Now it has lost two. ..................
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-66829826
