How long until Ukraine retakes Crimea? End of the year maybe?

My understanding is that Ukraine does not intend to invade Crimea – Zelenskyy made some pretty explicit statement on this, something about how many lives would be lost in doing so. What my understanding from listening to Michael Kofman (“the aim will be to make Russia’s continued presence in Crimea not viable”) and doing a bit of reading between the lines is is that they expect to just cut off supply of Crimea from Russia. Cut the land bridge, knock out the Kerch Strait Bridge, and then make water transport via the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea impractical due via threatening cargo shipping there. I doubt that it’s actually necessary to cut off air transport, as I don’t think that Russia has the capacity to supply Crimea via air.

My guess is that if Russia is determined to sink resources into it, stockpile supplies there now, and is also willing to evacuate civilian population from Crimea, they can potentially probably turtle up there for rather longer than six months. And the timer hasn’t really started on that yet, because the Kerch Strait Bridge is only partly down, the land bridge is still open, and marine transport is still open. So I’d guess that six months is probably optimistic, if Russia wants to push back hard.