Ukraine turns to strangling Russian logistics in Crimea — and it's working

Ukraine's siege of Crimea has been a long time coming.

Crimea is under an effective siege as Ukraine has been systematically isolating the occupied peninsula with a multipronged campaign of drone strikes.

"Hell is beginning," Ukrainian Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov said in a June 17 interview. "Logistics are being cut off. Crimea is being isolated."

Ukraine plans to fully isolate the peninsula, cutting it off from Russian supply while destroying critical infrastructure — ultimately allowing the Russian occupation of Crimea to "wither on the vine."

The Ukrainian "blockade" has already led to severe fuel shortages, while long-range drone strikes on electrical infrastructure have led to power outages across the peninsula. Russian tourists have been heading home, while increasingly panicked Russian military bloggers attempt to sound the alarm over the situation in Crimea.

"It is grave now, but promises to become critical in just a few weeks if the enemy continues its 'strategic air offensive' against it at an increasing pace," was the gloomy assessment of former FSB officer and convicted war criminal Igor Girkin.

Ukrainian strikes on Crimea are not new, but the current campaign marks a shift from sporadic attacks on high-value military targets to a sustained effort to make the peninsula harder to supply and hold.

Since April 2026, Ukraine's mid-range drones have been systematically targeting Russian traffic transiting along the R-280 — the so-called "Novorossiya highway" — as Fedorov's "logistics lockdown" swung into action. Ukraine has also been striking the ferries Russia uses to transport oil and military materiel across the Kerch Strait, the bridges that connect the peninsula to the occupied part of Kherson Oblast, and fuel depots, gas storage facilities, and electrical infrastructure in Crimea itself.

"Ukrainian strikes are increasingly shifting towards Crimea," Oksana Kuzan, co-founder of The Ukrainian Security and Cooperation Center, told the Kyiv Independent. "What began as the use of drones to sever key logistical arteries in Donetsk Oblast has evolved into a much larger operation."

This operation is already having a significant impact. After the oil terminal in Kerch was struck by Ukrainian drones on June 21, Russian occupation authorities declared a total ban on fuel sales to civilians.

"Fuel will be sold only to government agencies that ensure the functioning and security of the Republic of Crimea," Russian-installed head of the Crimean Republic Sergey Aksyonov announced later the same day.

In another attempt to "conserve fuel," Russian-installed governor of Sevastopol Mikhail Razvozhaev announced the mandatory closing of supermarkets, bars, and restaurants in the regional capital at 8 p.m.

Compounding Russian misery, Ukrainian drones struck the Simferopol Power Station and Sevastopol's main electric substation on June 24, leaving the regional capital and large parts of the peninsula without power. "The enemy is striking again, trying to deprive us of our usual living conditions and sow panic," Razvozhaev complained on Telegram.

Setting conditions for a logistics siege

Ukrainian strikes against targets in Crimea are nothing new. Since 2022, Ukraine has been slowly but surely forcing Russia to demilitarize the Crimean peninsula, hitting airfields, air defense sites, and naval bases.  

The Saky air base in Novofedorivka was struck by mysterious long-range missiles in August 2022, the first significant attack on a Russian military facility on the peninsula. Seven Russian fighter jets were destroyed, and four were damaged.

Attacks continued in 2023, with Ukraine using R-360 Neptune cruise missiles to target and destroy Russian long-range S-400 air defense systems.

Russian ships of the Black Sea Fleet were attacked with maritime drones and long-range missiles, while Anglo-French Storm Shadow cruise missiles dramatically destroyed the fleet's headquarters in their historical home base of Sevastopol. The constant Ukrainian harassment forced the Russian navy to relocate the Black Sea Fleet to Novorossiysk, around 350 kilometers (220 miles) to the east.

Since 2025, Ukrainian long-range drone units, particularly the "Prymary" special operations unit of Ukrainian military intelligence (HUR), have been hunting Russian military targets — particularly air defense systems and radars — across the peninsula.

"Ukraine has focused heavily on degrading Russian air defense systems, not just in Crimea but across all occupied territories," Kyle Glen, an investigator at the Centre for Information Resilience, who has been tracking the Ukrainian and Russian drone campaigns, told the Kyiv Independent.

"The destruction of these systems has paved the way for Ukraine's middle strike campaign on logistics in the south and also successful long-range strikes on targets in Crimea and in Russia itself," Glen said.

The drone blockade

Ukraine's attempted "drone blockade" is a new tactic, enabled by the degradation of Russian air defenses and facilitated by Ukraine's new fleet of cheap, mainly domestically produced, mid-range drones and loitering munitions. Russia heavily relies on road-borne logistics transiting the Novorossyia highway to supply fuel and military materiel to sustain its occupation of Crimea, as well as to supply Russian troops occupying parts of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts. Indeed, the creation of a "land bridge" to Crimea was a key Russian war objective.

Military cargo traffic on sections of the route had decreased by 71% in the preceding two weeks, head of Ukraine's Unmanned Systems Forces Robert "Magyar" Brovdi said on June 9. In the face of the Ukrainian drone threat, the Russian military has been instituting a convoy system — where groups of tankers are escorted by mobile anti-aircraft teams — and dedicating significant numbers of personnel to anti-drone duty.

It doesn't seem to have helped much, as videos of numerous Russian logistics vehicles being destroyed by the Unmanned Systems Forces and a host of other Ukrainian military units are published on a daily basis. The mobile anti-aircraft teams themselves are frequently victims of Ukraine's prowling drones.

Russia will struggle to meaningfully counter Ukraine's swarm of small, inexpensive, and mass-produced drones, Michael Bohnert, a defense researcher at the RAND Corporation, believes.

"The Ukrainian campaign is very sustainable," Bohnert told the Kyiv Independent. "Ukraine's Hornet drone costs up to $5,000, the Darts drone costs about $2,000," Bohnert said, explaining that the cost of each drone was significantly less than the cost of a Russian man-portable surface-to-air missile, and around the same cost as a burst of proximity-fused shells for a heavy anti-aircraft gun. "Ukraine seems to have enough capacity for sustained strikes," Bohnert said, something that wasn't true even a year ago.

Bridges, ferries, and chokepoints

As well as targeting individual trucks, Ukraine is also attempting to destroy the transportation links that connect Crimea to Russia and to Russian-occupied Ukraine: railway links, bridges, and ferries. This campaign is also having significant success.

Multiple road and rail bridges connecting the peninsula to occupied areas of Kherson Oblast have been repeatedly targeted by Ukrainian drones, destroying at least one and heavily damaging at least three others.

Satellite imagery shows severe damage to the Henichsesk road bridge, now seemingly unable to be used by any traffic, while the Chonhar road bridge was heavily damaged, with one lane completely closed to traffic. In both cases, Russian military engineers have been constructing pontoon bridges alongside the concrete structures.

Ukraine had previously targeted the Chonhar road bridge using Storm Shadow cruise missiles in 2023, doing significant but ultimately repairable damage. Limited stocks of the expensive Anglo-French-supplied missiles meant that a sustained campaign of air strikes was impossible; Ukraine's domestically produced drones have changed that calculation — if the drone strikes cannot completely destroy the bridges, they can at least damage them sufficiently to make the passage of heavy military equipment and large civilian logistics vehicles impossible.

"Ukraine appears to have sufficient capacity to keep bridges and other key logistics pathways disabled," Bohnert told the Kyiv Independent. "Ukrainian counter bridge drones like the Behemoth cost less than $50,000, and several are needed to take out bridges. But these are well below the $2,000,000 price tag of a Storm Shadow cruise missile." Crucially, they are also manufactured in Ukraine, ensuring a consistent supply, and have no political strings attached.

Ferries across the Kerch Strait have also been targeted. Traffic across the Kerch bridge is heavily restricted, with fuel tankers, military logistics, and other heavy cargo traffic forced to use ferries to cross the strait. Russia has banned the transit of fuel tankers and other heavy goods traffic across the Kerch bridge; fearful of a repeat of the Ukrainian attack in October 2022, which saw a truck bomb detonate alongside a railway tanker loaded with fuel oil, causing a blazing fire and the collapse of multiple spans of the road bridge.

On April 8, drones operated by the HUR's Department of Active Operations struck the "Slavyanin" railway ferry, doing significant damage to the vessel and knocking it out of action. Later satellite images showed the vessel tied up in a dock, listing heavily, its bow half underwater.

The "Panagia" and "Lavrentiy" ferries — which the Russians had been using to transfer military equipment from Russia to Crimea — were struck on June 21, causing ferry services to be suspended. Ukrainian sources claimed another unnamed ferry was also targeted in the same attack. Any heavy traffic that is unable to use ferries to cross the Kerch Strait therefore has to take the R-280 coastal road and run the gauntlet of Ukrainian drones.

As bad as the situation is in Crimea right now, it could always get worse.

Russian military bloggers are now openly worrying about another Ukrainian strike on the Kerch bridge itself, which was opened by Vladimir Putin in May 2018 and is now surrounded by anti-aircraft guns, smoke generators, and multiple layers of maritime obstacles, designed to protect it from attack by the air or the sea.

Can pressure on Crimea force talks?

Kuzan believes that Ukraine's success in isolating Crimea will aid attempts to force Russia to re-enter the negotiation process. "If Ukraine is not already seizing the initiative from Russia, it is at least laying the groundwork for doing so," Kuzan said. "Conditions that will ultimately force Russia to sit down at the table for a genuine negotiation process."

Hanna Notte, a Russia expert at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, told the Kyiv Independent that while Ukraine could inflict significant "economic pain" on Russia, both in Crimea and in Russia more generally, the prospect of Russia agreeing to a ceasefire because of Ukrainian pressure on Crimea was unlikely.

"I think developments in Crimea eliciting a specific response by Russia are only going to happen if the Ukrainians are able to threaten Russia's hold on Crimea," Notte said, adding she didn't believe the Ukrainians currently had the ability to threaten Russia's ultimate control over the peninsula.

"Our operation, including the one concerning Crimea, is carefully calculated," Ukrainian President Zelensky said in his nightly address on June 24, claiming that if Ukraine receives support promised by Western partners during the recent G7 meeting, "we will promptly create the conditions that will force Russia to choose peace."

Author's note:

This is Jimmy Rushton, author of this piece. The isolation of Crimea was many years in the making, and something I've been reporting on since 2022. Deep dives like this into important developments in the war are only possible because of the support of our readers. If you enjoy this type of analysis, please consider supporting the Kyiv Independent by becoming a member.