'Ships Will Flee': Probable Scenario For Crimea's Liberation Revealed

One of the first targets of the AFU should be the Kerch bridge.

The most likely scenario for the liberation of the Crimean peninsula is a military-political way of solving the problem. Political analyst Oleksandr Kochetkov expressed this opinion to Glavred.

As Kochetkov noted, such a scenario assumes that the Ukrainian Armed Forces will start to reach every possible location on the peninsula with various kinds of weapons and will destroy as many military facilities as possible.

"Fortunately, Crimea is not very densely built up - it's not the built up area of central Ukraine. There are quite a lot of vacant places where you can hit military facilities: airfields, accumulations of equipment, anti-aircraft and other installations. We need to make sure that all the remaining ships escape from Crimea, from the base in Sevastopol, towards Novorossiysk. Ukrainian troops will need to go into Crimea roughly as far as Armyansk and Krasnoperekopsk, i.e. to pass the isthmus. If we pass it, it will mean that we will be able to move further along the whole Crimea without any problems," the analyst explained.

Kochetkov noted that by this point there should no longer be the Crimean bridge.

"I don't know what will happen to it - whether it will dissolve, blow up again, something will fly to it or it will collapse itself, but it should not be there. That is the condition that must be met," he said.

According to the analyst, it will already be possible to stop near Krasnoperekopsk and Armyansk and start diplomatic talks about Crimea given the condition that the Ukrainian defenders can hit any point with a high-precision missile.

"Then the talks will go more or less normally. But it must be preceded by access to the Sea of Azov, Berdyansk and cutting the land corridor from Russia to Crimea, access to Mariupol and so on. And a mere attack on Crimea will get us nowhere. There must be a large-scale counteroffensive in Donbass, cutting the land corridor near Melitopol and Berdyansk, and reaching the administrative border of Crimea. Then the process may progress," Kochetkov noted.

Earlier, in an interview with the Charter97.org website, US General Ben Hodges said that Crimea would become a trap for the occupants.