Oddly, one has to hope today that Russia will overcome the considerable engineering issues of building the infamous Kerch bridge connecting Russia to annexed Crimea.
It may happen that the seemingly unstable seabed and weather conditions in the Kerch Strait will prove to be too complicated for building and holding such a bridge.
Then, it becomes likely that the Kremlin will want to create another land transportation corridor between its newly annexed territories, i.e. to create a link from the Donets Basin to the Crimean peninsula. Yet, Kyiv will obviously be uncooperative in solving this issue which could push Moscow to seek a military solution. As Ukraine’s army has become a formidable force by now, this would probably mean a major and protracted Russian-Ukrainian war along the northern shores of the Azov Sea.
The wider repercussions of this development could be considerable.
Probably, the hryvnia would make another deep dive further impoverishing an already extremely poor Ukrainian population.
This and other effects of a full-scale war for Mariupol, Berdyansk, Melitopol etc. could trigger Ukrainian mass emigration into the European Union via Ukraine’s “green borders” with Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania (or via other routes).
Perhaps, hundreds of thousands would start fleeing from an unwinnable war and increasing misery. Such a mass population movement would mean that the Ukrainian economy and eventually the Ukrainian state could altogether collapse. That would further fuel a new refugee crisis in the EU – perhaps, then involving millions of Ukrainians fleeing from plain chaos.
By that time, however, the primary concern for Brussels may not even be these new refugees any more. Instead, the question of what happens to Ukraine’s four nuclear power plants – above all Europe’s largest nuclear power plant in Zaporizhzhia, close the likely war zone, will become the preeminent one.
On the one hand, this scenario is apocalyptic and thus looks unlikely.
Yet, how likely is it, on the other hand, that:
(a) Russia will give back Crimea to Ukraine, or
(b) Ukraine and Russia can come to an agreement about a land transportation corridor from Russia to Crimea, or
(c) Moscow will permanently settle with the current situation of the annexed peninsula having no land connection whatsoever to Russia?
Thus, we should all hope for Russia’s imperial geologists and engineers to figure out how to build that damned bridge through the Kerch Strait.
