> We don’t really know what Russias strategy is here. They could be hitting the north near Kyiv as a primary distraction to build a land bridge to Crimea and ho

> We don’t really know what Russias strategy is here. They could be hitting the north near Kyiv as a primary distraction to build a land bridge to Crimea and hold on to the east. I agree, this whole belief that they are fixing history (from a russian perspective) and forcing Ukraine to be Russian again seems to be a bit of a pretext. They have huge reserves of Oil and Gas in Crimea, this would have guaranteed many more years of Gazprom cash cow for Russia. The problem is Crimea does not have it's own water supply it depends on mainland Ukraine, this is why I think they first focused on securing Cherson and Marioepol. This is probably the part they want to keep after negotiations, they just miscalculated expecting that the international response would have a been a shoulder shrug similar to South Ossetia in the Georgian war of 2008.