Ukraine is trying to isolate Crimea from over 70 miles away with its new drones, and new fuel cuts on the peninsula suggest the campaign is bearing fruit.
Crimea’s Russian-appointed governor, Sergei Aksyonov, announced on Sunday that the annexed peninsula would cease public fuel sales entirely.
“Fuel will be sold only to government agencies that ensure the functioning and security of the Republic of Crimea,” Aksyonov said in a statement.
The new decision is the most severe so far in a string of recent restrictions on the peninsula, a regional stronghold key to supplying Russia’s troops in southern Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions.
Crimea has gradually tightened its fuel access, rationing sales to 5.2-gallon portions in late May and then suspending the issuance of new coupons for those rations in early June. Those weeks saw hundreds of Ukrainian mid-range drones, a new class of fixed-wing uncrewed craft designed to fly 30 to 300 km, pounding highways, bridges, and ports connecting Crimea to the mainland.
In Sevastopol, a city of 580,000 that hosts Russia’s key military bases, local authorities also said on Sunday that they would introduce an evening curfew for public transport, retail, and food services.
Street lighting would be turned off for two days, said the city’s governor, Mikhail Razvozhaev, who added that the cuts were “due to recent events on the peninsula and the need to quickly adjust logistics.”
Sea ferry services, which the peninsula had been relying on after its connecting bridges were damaged by drone strikes, have also been suspended after Ukraine attacked the Kerch Strait, the waterway between Crimea and Russia’s Krasnodar region.
An oil depot along the strait was also attacked, according to local reports and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who confirmed the attacks on Sunday.
The strikes have been deadly, with local authorities reporting at least five people killed in the latest attacks. The Russian defense ministry said on Sunday that it shot down 239 Ukrainian drones overnight.
Ukraine’s new priority target
Ukrainian commanders say the drone attacks are part of a concerted effort by Kyiv to besiege Crimea.
“We will create conditions that will make it extremely difficult for any military personnel or those working in the defense industry to remain in Crimea, in the temporarily occupied territories, or use the access routes to them,” Maj. Robert “Magyar” Brovdi, the commander of Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces, told Reuters on June 11.
Ukraine’s defense minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, echoed the same sentiment on Wednesday.
“In essence, Crimea is being isolated by drones. And in the near future, it looks like Crimea will turn into an island,” he told local media.
Should Ukraine successfully isolate Crimea, Russia would be hard-pressed to keep logistics and troops flowing to Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. An alternate logistics route, the R-280 highway, runs along the coast of the Sea of Azov to the north, connecting the southern front to the Russian region of Rostov-on-Don.
Ukraine has also been using its mid-range drones to harass the highway, destroying Russian air defenses and supply trucks.
Brovdi told Reuters that traffic on the highway had slowed by over 70% since the drone attacks started.
These drones have been key to Ukraine’s new strategy of targeting Russian logistics in the rear. Equipped with heavier payloads and countermeasures for electronic warfare, they’ve been hampering Russia’s chosen method of fighting, where it floods the front lines to leverage a matériel and troop advantage against Ukraine.
“We’re actually quite bullish on the prospects for Ukraine having some substantial upper-hand momentum as we go into the summer,” George Barros, the director of Innovation and Open Source Tradecraft at the Institute for the Study of War, previously told Business Insider.
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