“Hell is beginning,” Ukrainian Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov said in a June 17 interview. “Logistics are being cut off. Crimea is being isolated.”
The Kyiv Independent reports that the drone campaign behind that promise is well under way. Kyiv aims to cut the occupied peninsula off from Russian supply and wreck its infrastructure until the occupation withers on the vine. Fuel is already short, and long-range strikes on electrical infrastructure have caused outages across the peninsula. Russian tourists have been leaving. Russian military bloggers are raising alarms, and former FSB officer Igor Girkin wrote that the situation “is grave now, but promises to become critical in just a few weeks” if the pace of attacks keeps rising.
The Kerch crossing
Traffic over the Kerch Strait has become a main target. Russia has barred fuel tankers and other heavy cargo from the Kerch bridge, fearing a repeat of October 2022, when a truck bomb went off beside a railway tanker loaded with fuel oil and several road spans collapsed. That pushes heavy cargo onto ferries, and Ukraine has gone after those too.
Drones run by the HUR’s Department of Active Operations hit the railway ferry Slavyanin on April 8. Later satellite images showed it in a dock, listing, bow half underwater. On June 21 the ferries Panagia and Lavrentiy, which Russia used to move military equipment into Crimea, were struck and services were suspended. Ukrainian sources claimed a third, unnamed ferry was hit in the same attack.
Whatever cannot cross by water has to take the R-280 coastal road, known as the Novorossiya highway, past Ukrainian drones. Since April, Ukrainian mid-range drones have worked that route. Robert “Magyar” Brovdi, head of the Unmanned Systems Forces, said on June 9 that military cargo traffic on sections of it had fallen 71% over the preceding two weeks. Russia has responded with convoys of tankers escorted by mobile anti-aircraft teams, but videos of destroyed vehicles appear daily, and the escorts are often hit themselves.
The bridge itself is a worry for Russian bloggers. Opened by Vladimir Putin in May 2018, it is ringed by anti-aircraft guns, smoke generators and layers of maritime obstacles. A satellite image showed smoke-generating vehicles on it on June 22, 2026.
Bridges, fuel and power
Road and rail bridges linking Crimea to occupied Kherson Oblast have been hit repeatedly. At least one has been destroyed and at least three heavily damaged, the report says. Satellite imagery shows the Henichesk road bridge apparently unusable, while one lane of the Chonhar road bridge is shut. Russian engineers are building pontoon bridges alongside both.
Michael Bohnert, a RAND defense researcher, put the economics bluntly. A Behemoth bridge-killer drone costs under $50,000, he told the paper, against $2,000,000 for a Storm Shadow cruise missile. He said Ukraine’s Hornet drone costs up to $5,000 and its Darts about $2,000. “The Ukrainian campaign is very sustainable,” he said.
On June 21, after drones hit the oil terminal in Kerch, Sergey Aksyonov, the Russian-installed head of Crimea, announced that fuel would go only to government agencies. Sevastopol’s Russian-installed governor, Mikhail Razvozhaev, ordered supermarkets, bars and restaurants to close at 8 p.m. to conserve fuel. On June 24 strikes on the Simferopol Power Station and Sevastopol’s main substation left the city and much of the peninsula dark. “The enemy is striking again, trying to deprive us of our usual living conditions and sow panic,” Razvozhaev wrote on Telegram.
Will it change Moscow’s position?
Oksana Kuzan of the Ukrainian Security and Cooperation Center argues that isolating Crimea lays groundwork for forcing Russia back to the table. Hanna Notte of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies was more cautious. Economic pain is possible, she said, but a ceasefire is unlikely unless Ukraine can threaten Russia’s hold on the peninsula, which she does not think it can yet do.
