[sofixa]

> Without Ukraine's Crimean peninsula, Russia loses sea access to the Black Sea and thus the Mediterranean for their navy (and also for trade),

That's untrue. Sevastopol is the main port and naval base in the Black Sea, but Russia has plenty of others, and some are even undergoing expansion - Novorosiisk ( the backup one). Sevastopol is in Crimea, but was shared under an agreement between the Russian and Ukrainian navies. So in reality, Russia gained nothing there besides an extra front for their current invasion of Ukraine.

[noselasd]

They gained exactly what they wanted by taking crimea, the inability to deploy nato forces and equipment there and domestic contorl of their leased naval port in crimea. Basically nato stated that yep, ukraine (and georgia) should join them, later on when the ukraine coup happened and got a pro western government, russia was going: yep - possibility of nato on crimea and losing our haval base there is not going to happen, it's ours now.

[sofixa]

But that didn't achieve anything. NATO can still deploy forces and equipment in Odessa or Mykolaiv, or in Romania or Bulgaria or Turkey, and can still easily block access to the Mediterranean.

[noselasd]

It all depends on your point of view - the russian point of view is that nato controlled crimea is much more unwanted, and would and leave them much more cornered compared to nato controlled Odessa and Mykolaiv (and that point shouldn't be too hard to realize by looking at the map). And they wanted to keep their naval base there, which they now can.

Romania, Bulgaria doesn't border Russia , Turkey is not on the land border and they have decent relations with them. But sure, they're likely not happy with that either - they just can't and will not do anything about it. With Crimea/Ukraine - they could.

[wolverine876]

> That's untrue. Sevastopol is the main port and naval base in the Black Sea, but Russia has plenty of others, and some are even undergoing expansion - Novorosiisk ( the backup one).

I have never seen someone claim that Novorosiisk was a sufficient port. Maybe it's a capacity issue?

> Sevastopol is in Crimea, but was shared under an agreement between the Russian and Ukrainian navies.

It is in a foreign country, an unfriendly one. That greatly limits Russia's freedom of action.

[sofixa]

Novorosiisk is undergoing expansion for precisely that reason. And Ukraine wasn't exactly unfriendly before the invasions, the Sevastopol lease was prolonged just before that.