Russia annexed Crimea back in 2014. In 2018, President Putin drove a truck to officially open the new Kerch bridge that would solidify Russia's connection and control over Crimea.
But Ukraine's recent surge of drone attacks has created a problem in Crimea. Ukraine actually has a 3-tier structure of drone attacks right now. There are the close-in attacks which have resulted in about 25,000 Russian casualties per month this year. There are the distant attacks on infrastructure such as the ones that have set Moscow on fire twice this week.
But the ones that may be most significant of all are the middle-distance attacks on Russian supply lines. Those have been very effective.
Now, Ukraine is focusing on the middle ground — the critical roads and railways, in some cases more than 100 miles from the front, that feed Russian troops and matériel into battle. Kyiv is calling the effort a “logistics lockdown,” and it is systematically reshaping the battlefield, at least until Russian forces find a way to adapt.
Ukraine is wreaking havoc on unarmored trucks and trains in the battlefield’s rear, using drones with upgraded engines and batteries, integrated Starlink communication systems and new artificial-intelligence capabilities. The ramped-up attacks are causing fuel shortages, complicating troop rotations and reducing Russian military activity on the front...
The campaign aimed at Russian logistics is having its most visible results along the southern front, where geography favors the Ukrainians.
The area includes Russia’s so-called land bridge to occupied Crimea, and Moscow relies on a roughly 185-mile stretch of exposed highways to supply its forces. On Monday, the Ukrainian military said its drone operators had established aerial control over a section of the land route used by Russian forces, significantly complicating “logistics related to supplying the Russian Army and fuel deliveries” to Crimea.
The only other connection between Russia and Crimea is the Kerch Bridge, which has come under repeated Ukrainian attack.
This is why there are long lines for gasoline in Crimea. The region is increasingly cut off from the rest of Russia.
Social media has filled with videos of fuel trucks on fire after drone attacks and of lines of cars snaking around gas stations as deliveries have been disrupted. One photographer documented on social media how she spent eight hours in line at night to get gas...
Crimea is the primary logistical hub and staging ground for Russian military operations across southern Ukraine. Isolating the peninsula from Russia, analysts say, could hobble Moscow’s forces on the parts of the front that have been the most fluid in recent months, with Ukrainian troops mounting successful counterattacks...
When the Russian travel blogger Anna Bunina went to Crimea on vacation at the end of May, she said online that she was looking forward to “sightseeing, driving around the peninsula and enjoying local wine.”
Instead, her trip turned into a “quest for gasoline,” she complained in a viral post that showed one empty gas station after another, their fuel price signs turned off.
Here's that Instagram video:
There are a limited number of ways to get in or out of Crimea and all of those are vulnerable now.
Overall, traffic on the main highway leading to the peninsula, a road that Russia calls Novorossiya, or “New Russia,” has fallen by two-thirds since Ukraine began its campaign, Mr. Brovdi, the unmanned systems commander, told Reuters last week. That figure could not be independently verified.
The only connection for vehicles and trains between Crimea and Russia itself is a bridge over the Kerch Strait that Moscow built at a cost of $7.5 billion and opened in 2018. Fuel deliveries on that bridge have been prohibited since a Ukrainian car bombing in the fall of 2022 set fuel tanks ablaze and badly damaged the structure.
Russia’s last railway ferry to Crimea was destroyed in April, and a small oil terminal on the peninsula’s southern coast has been hit in several Ukrainian drone strikes in recent weeks.
The war is coming home to Crimea in ways it hasn't in other parts of Russia. This week officials banned the use of mopeds saying they confuse anti-drone defenses.
Crimea, the peninsula annexed by Russia from Ukraine in 2014, has banned riding moped scooters, quad bikes and motorcycles at night-time, saying they sound like drone attacks and suggesting children are doing it deliberately at Kyiv’s behest. Sergei Aksyonov, the Russian-installed governor of the illegally occupied peninsula, said the ban would be in place between 8pm and 6am from Wednesday onwards.
Oleg Kryuchkov, Aksyonov’s adviser, claimed separately on Telegram: “The enemy is recruiting your children for night-time rides … The moped noise hampers the work of defence systems. Their engines sound similar [to drones].”
And just this morning, Ukraine hit another bridge connecting Crimea to the mainland.
Ukraine’s Defense Forces struck a railway bridge over the North Crimean Canal during an overnight operation on June 18, along with the Moscow Oil Refinery, an oil depot in Russia’s Rostov region, and several other Russian military logistics facilities.
Here's video of that attack. I'd say that bridge is going to need some repairs. The map also shows two other rail bridges that were attacked.
In Crimea, a key railway bridge on the Kerch-Dzhankoy line was attacked.
— Devana 🇺🇦 (@DevanaUkraine) June 18, 2026
There was also an attack on the automobile bridge over the North Crimean Canal. pic.twitter.com/MO8gAxPixq
Could Russia's control of Crimea be under threat? Not yet, but as this Sky News report suggests, Russia may need to do something dramatic to regain control it has already lost before the situation gets worse and becomes an embarrassment to the Kremlin.
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