The Washington Post devoted a large article to Crimea as the cornerstone of the war. If earlier Ukraineʼs statements that it would return the peninsula annexed by Russia were perceived as something unrealistic, then after a series of victories on the battlefield it became quite probable ― even "dangerously probable", the publication writes. Dangerous, because for the Kremlin, Crimea is the basis of the imperial myth, and if Putin, as ex-commander of the British army Lord David Richards put it, "rub his nose onto the fact that Crimea is being taken away", he can resort to the most radical steps, including the use of tactical nuclear weapons. For Ukraine, agreeing to the annexation of Crimea only means the continuation of the war in the future ― because for Ukrainian society, leaving millions of citizens under Russian oppression and making a territorial compromise with the enemy is unacceptable. If you add to this the Westʼs fear of the possible escalation of the war over Crimea, you can end up with a decades-long military conflict like the Israeli-Palestinian, Nagorno-Karabakh, or Kurdistan conflicts. Another option is a diplomatic compromise, according to which the peninsula passes to Ukraine after a certain time and under certain conditions, as it once happened with Britain, China and Hong Kong. At the negotiations with Russia in March, the publication mentions, the Ukrainian side voiced readiness for such a compromise. However, a lot of different things happened after that. And at the annual international conference "Crimean Platform", the goal of which is the return of Crimea to Ukraine, this thesis was emphasized again this year. And the permanent representative of the President of Ukraine in Crimea, Tamila Tasheva, said that the vast majority of Russian citizens who settled on the peninsula after its occupation should be deported back to Russia. In particular, because they will become a constant threat to the national security of Ukraine. Not focusing on this at the moment, the Ukrainian authorities state that almost all those who moved to the peninsula from Russia after 2014 did so illegally.
The majority of Ukrainian Jews traditionally communicated in Russian ― but the war is changing that, writes The Times of Israel. The author of the material describes the conversation of three rabbis in Lviv: they call their hometowns "Lvov", "Lugansk" and "Dnepr«», as Russians say. And they admit that the next generation of rabbis will most likely use Ukrainian city names. Among the visitors of the synagogues where these rabbis serve, there are more and more people who do not want to be associated with the aggressor country in any way, and this primarily concerns the language. Therefore, those who do not know Yiddish or Hebrew well, ask to communicate with them in Ukrainian ― and to read sacred texts for Jews in the same language. Despite the fact that currently many of these texts do not have a Ukrainian translation. "There are those of us who believe that Putin does not speak Russian," says Dnipro Rabbi Meir Stambler, head of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Ukraine, which unites 36 synagogues. "However, in ten years, all local Jews will speak Ukrainian."