“Power went off and didn’t come back on, even for an hour,” a Crimean woman named Olga told The New York Times. “Authorities have forgotten about us, that’s clear to see.”
Her town is one of many. The Times reported that Ukraine has run a drone campaign against the power grid on the Russian-occupied peninsula, leaving hundreds of thousands of people without electricity, sometimes for days at a stretch.
Blackouts across the north
The campaign began in June and mostly hit infrastructure near Russian military bases in northern Crimea, the Times said. “By late July, every major town and village in the north of the peninsula had suffered full blackouts,” its report said. Vladimir Putin has not publicly acknowledged the outages, the paper noted.
A Russian diplomat gave Tass a figure for one single week: Ukrainian strikes, he said, had cut power to the homes of 1.4 million Crimeans out of a prewar population of 2.5 million. The Times compared the strikes to Russia’s much larger, yearslong assault on Ukraine’s civilian energy systems, which leaves millions of Ukrainians without light or heat each winter. The aim is to pressure Moscow toward a peace deal.
Zelensky had signaled a Crimea-focused push in late June. In a social media post on June 26, he said that “no one on Earth can say that we are not fighting for Crimea or that we have forgotten about Crimea.” He tied the fight to the Crimean Tatar people and to the goal of bringing “freedom back to all those who are currently in Russian captivity.”
Tourism takes the hit
The Moscow Times reported in mid-July that the Russian government had set aside 4.3 billion rubles ($56.3 million) from its reserve fund to support tourism in Crimea and Sevastopol. The Russian Tour Operators Association (ATOR) said around a million trips to the two had been canceled. The same outlet quoted a figure of bookings collapsing by as much as 70%.
Moscow Times columnist Jason Corcoran described the damage in his own terms. Sustained drone strikes, he wrote, “have disrupted fuel supplies, electricity and transport links, driving up prices and exposing Crimea’s logistical fragility.” By late June the queues for gasoline had vanished, he said, but only because scarce fuel was being diverted to emergency services, utilities and favored businesses. State-controlled lender VTB reportedly cut ATM withdrawal limits for some customers. Rolling blackouts, communications outages and repeated attacks on the Kerch Bridge and the land corridor linking Crimea to Russia have unsettled residents and tourists, he added.
Corcoran also pointed to the Don-Azov Canal, a key route for Russian grain exports, where disruption threatens shipments. And he quoted the military blogger Rybar, who warned that the campaign was entering its “final phase” by targeting the Kerch Bridge.
Zelensky declared in 2023 that he wanted Ukraine to recapture Crimea, which Russia has occupied for more than 12 years. Corcoran argued that Kyiv does not need to retake the peninsula to hurt Moscow: raising the cost of holding it may be enough. That is his reading, not an announced Ukrainian plan.
Sources
- Putin’s Ukraine Fairy Tale Is Colliding With Reality: His Prized Crimea Riviera Is Going Dark and Empty
- Even If Ukraine Doesn't Recapture Crimea, Kyiv Has Damaged Russia's Credibility – The Moscow Times
