I don't know. Sevastopol is super important to them. I hope they won't do anything drastic.
It's the only warm water port Russia has on the black sea. And thus full year access to the mediterranean. I doubt they will give it up. Perhaps the rest of Crimea, I could imagine. But not the base.
I thought this was not a warm water port but indeed it is.
Their main port in the black sea is still Sevastopol though. It would cost a lot to transfer all that over to Novorossiysk and it would also cause them to lose a lot of face. I doubt they will let that happen.
Launch a strategic nuke, no. Nobody expects that. But we're talking about tactical ones. The smaller ones that can be dropped from a plane or installed in a short range missile.
Even if one or two fail, they will find one that works. It would set a terrible precedent for the rest of the world, where any kind of nuke deployment right now is "not done".
We don't want to go back to the 60s where nuclear-tipped torpedoes were regularly carried and in fact one almost was launched during the cuba crisis.
> Launch a strategic nuke, no. Nobody expects that. But we're talking about tactical ones. The smaller ones that can be dropped from a plane or installed in a short range missile.
Even with a tactical nuke we are talking about the end of the Russian federation, if anything would invite a physical kinetic response it would be a nuke, tactical or not.
Russia won't launch nukes come what may, because Putin's now very very big brother Xi doesn't want a nukes-equipped Taiwan, and holiday resorts for Moscovites are less important than TSMC chips.
Sevastopol being only Black Sea port is not true. Russia has Novorossiysk where they constructed naval base before 2014. The remains of the Black Sea fleet have moved there because it is safer than Crimea.
It's the only warm water port Russia has on the black sea. And thus full year access to the mediterranean. I doubt they will give it up. Perhaps the rest of Crimea, I could imagine. But not the base.