Crimea

Crimea, or Krym in Ukrainian (also spelled Krim), is an autonomous republic in southern Ukraine. The republic is coterminous with the Crimean Peninsula and lies between the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov. In 2014, Russia invaded and illegally annexed Crimea. This invasion was denounced by the international community.

The Crimean peninsula is linked on the northwest to the mainland by the Perekop Isthmus, a five-mile wide strip of land that has been the site of various battles for the control of Crimea. In the years before its larger war on Ukraine, the Russian air force deployed five batteries of its S-400 surface-to-air missiles, including their radars, to occupy Crimea.

In 2023, the Ukrainian navy destroyed two of them. The S-400 batteries destroyed by the Ukrainians are part of those defending the Russian Black Sea Fleet at its anchorage in Sevastopol. The initial raid on an S-400 was carried out on August 23, 2023. It targeted the battery in Cape Tarkhankut on the Crimean Peninsula’s northwest coast. The second, on the 14th of September 2023, hit a battery thirty-six miles south in Yevpatoriya.