“The party that controls Crimea will win the war,” Hodges said in an interview with Ukrinform. He claimed that if Russia stays on the peninsula, Ukraine will not be able to restore safe access to the Sea of Azov or fully restore Mariupol or Berdyansk. At the same time, according to him, Moscow would retain the possibility to threaten shipping from Odessa and Mykolaiv.
Hodges called the isolation of Crimea the first step in the eventual liberation of Crimea. He talked about the interruption of the road to Dzhankoy, the destruction of the Kerch bridge and the fact that Ukraine must make the peninsula unusable for the Russian army. “Ukraine now has the ability to hit every square meter of Crimea,” he said.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy used a similar political framework of Crimea earlier when he quoted the imprisoned Crimean Tatar activist Nariman Dzelal. “It started with Crimea and it will end with Crimea,” Zelenskyy said. Since then, the phrase has been repeatedly used as shorthand for the Ukrainian view of the war: Russian aggression did not begin until February 2022, but with the annexation of the peninsula in 2014.
The latest series of Ukrainian strikes shows that Kiev is trying to fulfill this idea with military means. Ukraine is trying to gradually cut off Crimea from Russian supply routes, fuel, air defense and logistics hubs.
Ukrainians cut the most sensitive arteries
In recent days, Ukraine has announced attacks on several strategic targets in the occupied Crimea. According to the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, the drones hit an oil warehouse near the Kerch thermal power plant, an electrical substation in the west of the peninsula and a liquefied gas distribution station in Simferopol.
At the same time, the Ukrainian Special Operations Forces claimed that, in cooperation with the Crimean resistance movement, they destroyed the railway bridge over the North Crimean Canal near the village of Rozdolne. They identified the bridge as an important logistical route through which Russia supplied its troops in the south of Ukraine. According to the Ukrainian army, the first attack was supposed to damage the structure of the bridge, the second was supposed to hit the repair equipment deployed on site. The claims could not be independently verified and Russian authorities did not immediately comment on them.
Roughly half of Crimea was without electricity after the attacks. However, the local energy supplier attributed the outages to “technical faults” in the network. Telegram channel Krymskij veter wrote about a large-scale fire at the Kerch thermal power plant.
Vantor satellite images from June 12 to 22 show damaged bridges, roads and oil storage facilities in Crimea and parts of Russia, according to Reuters. Damaged storage tanks, black smoke from oil storage tanks and smoke screens in the area of the Crimean Bridge should have been visible in the footage. Other images show the damage to the Stavské and Čongarské bridges, as well as the border crossing. Footage from June 21 also captures a fire in the Russian port of Kavkaz and damaged oil tanks in Rybinsk in the Yaroslavl region.
“We are turning Crimea into an island”
The Ukrainian government describes the current campaign as an attempt to logistically close the peninsula. Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov said last week that Ukraine was “isolating Crimea with drones.” According to him, in the near future it may happen that Crimea will turn into an island for the Russians.
The commander of the Ukrainian Unmanned Systems Forces, Robert Brovdi, known by the call sign Hungarian, says the same. In an interview with Reuters, he said that the goal of his campaign is to cut off Crimea from Russia. According to Brovdi, Ukrainian attacks over the past month have reduced traffic on the Novorossiya highway, which Russia uses as a critical supply route through occupied southern Ukraine to Crimea, by more than two-thirds.
“We are isolating Crimea in the near future,” Brovdi said. He compared vehicle collisions on the open road to “shooting partridges in an open field.”
Brovdi claims that Ukraine wants to create conditions in which it will be extremely difficult for Russian soldiers, defense industry workers and logisticians to stay in Crimea or use access routes to the occupied territories. Reuters reports that the Russian Defense Ministry did not respond to a request for comment on the claims.
According to Brovdi, the number of medium-range combat flights by Ukrainian drones increased 28-fold over the past year, and the number of deep strikes on Russian territory almost quadrupled. According to him, in the first five months of the year, Ukrainian drone units destroyed 174 Russian air defense systems worth approximately 5.4 billion dollars. Reuters reports that the figures could not be independently verified.
Two main routes to Crimea
The American Institute for the Study of War and the Critical Threats Project assess the Ukrainian attacks as a systematic campaign aimed at limiting Russia’s ability to maintain logistics and transport fuel through the Kerch Strait.
According to analysts, Russia has two main land supply routes to the occupied Crimea. The first is the so-called land bridge across the occupied parts of the Donetsk, Zaporizhia and Kherson regions. The second is the connection via the Kerch Bridge and ferry service across the Kerch Strait.
Ukrainian forces intensified attacks on both routes in June, according to ISW. They hit the port of Kavkaz in the Krasnodar region, which is located by the Kerch Strait, the oil infrastructure in occupied Kerch, radars and air defense systems in the vicinity of the bridge. Ukrainian officials said they also hit oil tanks at the TES-Terminal-1 terminal, which Russia uses to transport fuel, liquefied gas and light petroleum products through the Kerch Strait.
Geolocated images confirmed the fires in the TES-Terminal-1 terminal and the port of Kavkaz, as well as the Ukrainian attacks on two radars north of Kurortny and west of Kerch. The Russian regional authorities in the Krasnodar region admitted the attack on the Panagia ferry and the fire in the oil terminal on the Chusskaya spit.
Russian occupation officials subsequently restricted the sale of fuel in Crimea. The head of the occupation administration, Sergej Aksionov, announced that gas stations have stopped selling fuel to non-state entities. In Sevastopol, local authorities introduced fuel-saving measures, curtailing the operation of public transport and large shops, suspending ferry services and canceling outdoor events. The city was also plagued by power outages on Wednesday, June 24.
A new class of drones is changing the Russian landscape
The current campaign relies on medium-range Ukrainian drones that can attack targets tens to hundreds of kilometers from the front. Business Insider describes them as a new class of fixed-wing unmanned vehicles designed for flights of approximately 30 to 300 kilometers. Ukraine attacks roads, bridges, ports and fuel infrastructure connecting Crimea with Russia.
This development is changing the nature of the Russian background. ABC writes that burning vehicles and clouds of smoke are increasingly appearing on the roads in the occupied parts of Ukraine. The Russian military used these communications to move supplies, fuel, ammunition and troops more than 100 kilometers behind the front line. However, according to Russian war bloggers, driving them has become a dangerous “lottery”.
ISW’s Kateryna Stepanenko told the ABC that Ukraine’s ability to paralyze Russian forces more than 150 to 160 kilometers from the front was a “very significant achievement” and a technological advantage. “It is no longer safe for Russian forces to operate in these areas,” she said.
According to Stepanenko, the same routes also serve to supply Crimea. The Ukrainian campaign therefore affects not only the troops at the front, but also the logistics of the peninsula, which Russia annexed in 2014 and has been using as a military hub ever since.
Crimea as both a symbol and a burden
The Atlantic Council assesses that Ukraine’s drone campaign is beginning to turn Crimea from a showcase for Putin’s politics into a burden. The peninsula has practical and symbolic significance for Moscow. Since the start of the full-scale invasion in 2022, Russia has used it as a military hub for operations in southern Ukraine and as a staging area for attacks against Ukrainian cities. At the same time, for Vladimir Putin, the annexation of Crimea is one of the main symbols of his efforts to restore Russia’s great power status.
However, according to the Atlantic Council, Ukrainian attacks target military nodes, fuel transports, command posts, air defenses, bridges, ferries and other logistical targets. The campaign did not come about overnight. It relies on technological innovations that Ukraine has been developing for a long time, and on the previous weakening of Russian air defenses in and around Crimea.
At the same time, the think-tank points out that it is premature to talk about a complete blockade of Crimea. Several routes remain open and Russia is trying to improvise, for example with pontoon bridges or plans to import fuel by sea. But the attacks make it difficult for Russia to maintain military operations in occupied southern Ukraine and Crimea.
The campaign also has a psychological effect. Crimea, which has been a traditional holiday region for many Russians, is facing fuel shortages, restrictions on public life and growing fears of more attacks. The occupation authorities have canceled some sporting events, limited children’s summer camps and introduced security measures that also affect civilian life.
Isolation is possible, but victory is not guaranteed
Michael Kofman of the Carnegie Endowment told Reuters that advances in drone technology make the gradual severing of Crimea from Russia feasible. However, he also pointed out that the broader strategic goal of pushing out Russian forces would still require a coordinated ground offensive.
John Lough, head of the foreign policy program at the New Eurasian Strategy Center, is similarly cautious. He told ABC that the war has entered a new phase, but it cannot be concluded that Ukraine already has a decisive advantage. According to him, Russia still has significant advantages: the size of the economy, defense industry and population.
“I don’t think we should just jump to the conclusion that the Ukrainians are now suddenly, against all odds, holding the trump card and defeating the Russian military. That, I think, is very far from reality,” Lough said.
This perspective is also important when evaluating the current attacks on Crimea. Ukraine can raise the price of Russian occupation, disrupt supplies, damage infrastructure, and force Moscow to shift resources to homeland defense. However, this in itself does not mean the immediate liberation of the peninsula.
