The next six months will witness a great deal of human tragedy. Ukraine’s armed forces will face harsh battlefield conditions, and Ukrainian civilians will continue to endure daily Russian attacks. Meanwhile, Russia’s underequipped and poorly led troops will suffer thousands of casualties, destroying the country’s remaining fighting capability. Already, the Russian military has suffered “significantly more than 100,000” deaths and injuries, according to the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley. And thanks to the neglect and cruel indifference of President Vladimir Putin’s regime, thousands more will perish this winter because of the Kremlin’s callous disregard for human life.
With the help of newly promised Western tanks and other weapons, Ukraine’s armed forces will also liberate more territory in the east and south of the country, making it possible to imagine an eventual Ukrainian campaign to retake Crimea. Illegally annexed by Putin in 2014, the peninsula served as a staging ground for Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Now, occupation of Crimea enables the Russian military to threaten Ukrainian positions from the south and gives Russia’s Black Sea Fleet a forward base for carrying out long-range attacks. But for the first nine month of the war, Kyiv’s Western backers were reluctant to support any military effort to return the territory to Ukraine, partly out of concern that such an attempt would cross a redline for Putin and invite disastrous Russian retaliation and partly because the peninsula is now home to a sizable number of people who identify with Russia, which could make it more difficult to reintegrate the territory into Ukraine.
