Since Russia occupied Crimea in 2014, Moscow has resettled close to a million people from the Russian mainland onto the peninsula. Ukraine's drone forces now say they intend to reverse that, cutting off roads, bridges and power supplies in an effort to make the peninsula uninhabitable for its occupiers.
More than 39,000 large drones launched from Ukraine have been shot down by Russian air defenses since January 2026, as they crossed into territory held by Russian forces. Occupied Crimea and three Russian federal subjects, the Belgorod, Kursk and Bryansk regions, were the most frequent targets.
The Russian Ministry of Defense reports that Moscow intercepts an average of 223 large Ukrainian drones each day. This figure does not include data from four occupied Ukrainian regions: Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk and Luhansk.
The Balance of Power Is Shifting
Many experts today consider the Ukrainian army to be the strongest in Europe, though for understandable reasons it lags well behind its adversary in troop numbers and ranks second. Some global rankings place the Ukrainian military 20th in the world.
This puts it behind the armies of Spain (18), Germany (12), Italy (10), Turkey (9), the United Kingdom (8) and France (6). How far Ukraine's military can develop hinges not only on the initiative of its soldiers and its domestic business environment, but also, substantially, on financial and logistical support from its allies.
As is the case in Russia, Ukraine's military-industrial complex and troop supply chains are being eroded by widespread government corruption. Units on both sides of the front line therefore often launch fundraisers for drones, vehicles, equipment and other essential items. As a result, ammunition and drones carrying "greetings" from donors in the Russian rear, or from sympathizers in Europe, frequently fly over enemy lines.
This year, however, the initiative belongs to Ukraine, and Kyiv now holds air superiority even over territory Russia has long controlled. Since the end of May, the 3rd Army Corps' Unmanned Systems Battalion has controlled the airspace over the occupied Luhansk region, severely disrupting the aggressor's rear logistics as far as 100 km from the front lines.
A Peninsula Under Siege
Ukrainian medium-range drones also control the "R-280 Novorossiya Highway", the name the occupying administration uses for the Ukrainian M-14 highway. This key land route, which connects the Russian hinterland with occupied Crimea, is regularly targeted by Ukrainian attacks. Photos and videos published by both sides of the conflict show it lined in several places with destroyed Russian military equipment.
The campaign has a public face in Major Robert Brovdi, commander-in-chief of Ukraine's Unmanned Systems Forces, whose call sign, Madyar, means "Hungarian". On 21 June, Brovdi declared that his drones, nicknamed "Madyar's Birds". would turn Crimea into "the Achilles' heel of the withered Koschei", a reference to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Writing on social media, he apologized in advance to Ukrainians in the occupied territories for the alarms, closed roads and bridges and disruption his campaign would bring, and urged them to stay away from military sites and protect themselves. He also said his drones would try to sever the peninsula's transportation routes and effectively turn it into an island, adding that he saw no other way to force a million occupiers out.
Crimea's isolation is not a new phenomenon so much as an intensifying one. Notably, since Russia's occupation of the peninsula began in 2014, around 100,000 Ukrainians have left the region amid persecution and repressive policies.
Meanwhile, the Kremlin has resettled the peninsula with between 800,000 and one million people from Russia, most of them in Sevastopol, Simferopol, Kerch and Yevpatoria. The population in these cities grew sharply between 2013 and 2024, doubling in Sevastopol alone. In doing so, Moscow is altering the demographic makeup of the occupied territory in violation of international humanitarian law, just as it has done elsewhere on occupied Ukrainian soil.
No Bridge, No Power, No Fuel
Lieutenant Colonel Maxym Zhorin, deputy commander of the Ukrainian 3rd Army Corps, wrote on social media on 24 June that Crimea was already a source of major problems for the Russians. He said the disruption of logistics routes there would cause shortages of everything from gasoline to bread, and that the effects would be felt more and more acutely with every subsequent strike. The day before, Ukrainian forces destroyed the most important inland bridge on the peninsula, which had been used, among other things, to move troops.
Since the attack on the Tavriyskaya power plant on the night of 19–20 June, which left several settlements in northwestern, central and southern Crimea without electricity and disrupted water supplies at affected pumping stations, the annexed peninsula has been hit by even more outages. Stores are running short of certain goods, and gas stations have run out of gasoline and diesel. In response to these disruptions, the occupying authorities declared a state of emergency in Crimea and Sevastopol on 26 June.
These shortages stem from Ukrainian shelling of the bridge connecting Crimea to the Russian mainland, as well as attacks on the M-14 highway, the route linking the peninsula to occupied mainland Ukraine. The disruption to oil product supplies, however, is not confined to the people and occupation forces in Crimea. The fuel shortage is being felt across Russia as a whole.
According to a report by the Russian website Verstka, based on statements from officials, complaints from residents and accounts in the Russian media, the population, and in some places even the military, is suffering from fuel supply disruptions in 76 federal subjects, the regions, republics and districts that make up Russia. In 29 of them, authorities have imposed some form of restriction.
Verstka reports that only five regions have not reported widespread fuel shortages or restrictions on fuel sales: Ingushetia, Chechnya, Kalmykia, Chukotka, and the Nenets Autonomous Area. Even there, however, residents, as in the rest of Russia, have complained about rising prices. In Chechnya, according to Rosstat data, gasoline prices rose by 8% in a single week, from 9 to 15 June, reaching 74.8 rubles ($0.71) per liter.
The Cracks Begin to Show
The occupying authorities cannot keep pace with repairing the power plants damaged by Ukrainian strikes. Moscow has no clear source of petroleum products for Crimea, and food shipments regularly brought in from the Krasnodar region will not resume anytime soon, given the shelling of the Crimean Bridge.
As a result, the first reports of Russians evacuating and leaving the peninsula are now emerging. It cannot be ruled out that the drone campaign against Crimea is connected to the special 40-day operation that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced on the evening of 25 June.
That, in turn, may tie back to Russia's advance on the last unoccupied part of the Donetsk region, including cities such as Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, whose surroundings Ukrainian forces have been fortifying since 2014. Notably, critics of a possible Ukrainian withdrawal from the Donbas, like the Russian side, describe this area as a strategically vital and heavily fortified stretch of the front line.
What happens in Crimea may prove as consequential as what happens around Kramatorsk and Sloviansk. Both fronts now appear bound up in the same calculation in Kyiv: that pressure applied in one theater can shape the balance of power in another, even as the war's broader outcome remains undecided.