Kyiv makes vital gains in Crimea

Vladimir Putin’s withdrawal of most of his Black Sea Fleet from occupied Crimea is a heartening rejoinder to last week’s decision by lily-livered US lawmakers to cut further aid to Kyiv. Satellite images confirming the removal from the port of Sevastopol of key elements of the Russian tyrant’s war machine against Ukraine underlines the shortsighted turpitude of US congressmen and some European leaders who are also showing signs of war weariness. The Russian President’s navy skedaddling ignominiously out of Sevastopol shows Kyiv is making major gains, even in Crimea, which Mr Putin boasted he had secured years ago.

The Black Sea Fleet is his pride and joy. There is no reason he would be pulling out key components of the fleet, such as frigates and submarines, other than the missile and drone strikes Kyiv has been raining down on Crimea, challenging Moscow’s illegal hold on the peninsula. Even fleet headquarters has been hit. Ukraine previously sank the fleet’s flagship, the missile cruiser Moskva. Ukrainian commandos have also launched raids across Crimea against Russian forces.

Russia is presenting its retreat from Sevastopol as a preventive move. But nothing can disguise the reality, as The Wall Street Journal reported, that it is a bad setback for Mr Putin and those faint hearts in the West who have written off Ukraine’s courageous fightback as doomed to fail.

Mr Putin’s illegal seizure of Crimea in 2014 – met with a supine response led by Barack Obama – was the opening shot of his war to overrun Ukraine. That lesson must not be lost on the isolationist pro-Trump US House of Representatives members who insisted last week that future US aid to Ukraine be excised from the last-gasp deal to prevent a federal shutdown, jeopardising Kyiv’s progress in the middle of a vital counteroffensive.

It will be a tragedy if that success was compromised by the embargo and leaders such as Robert Fico, who won last Sunday’s election in Slovakia, a NATO and EU member, who has vowed “not to send another bullet to Ukraine”.

The folly of those wilfully undermining Kyiv’s war effort is hard to fathom.