Recent coverage of the war in Ukraine in the Western media has focused heavily on Kyiv’s land offensive, especially its attempts to push toward the Black Sea coast. Much of the scrutiny, rightly or wrongly, has been on Kyiv’s lack of significant progress in 2023, with nothing comparable to the breakthrough offensives in Kharkiv and Kherson in the fall of 2022.
While some of this criticism may be justified, the almost singular Western focus on territorial breakthroughs has distracted from the fact that Ukraine is fighting a medium- to long-term war on multiple fronts against a significantly larger and heavily entrenched foe. What’s more, the lack of a major Ukrainian land advance obscures the very real battlefield successes Ukraine has had in other theaters of the conflict—most notably in Russian-occupied Crimea and the Black Sea.
A crucial part of Kyiv’s long-term plan for the war is to push Russia out of the Crimean Peninsula
