Ukraine Has Now Turned Crimea From An Asset To A Liability For Russia

What is happening to Crimea right now is emblematic of the larger strategic failure with Putin's overall Ukrainian invasion strategy. Economically, the areas he has captured have either been reduced to smoking heaps of rubble (thanks to Russia's indiscriminate bombardment tactics) which means, rather than contributing to the Russian economy, they will require years of investment and rebuilding from Kremlin funds; and militarily they have become a trap in which tens of thousands of Russian soldiers or secret police are required to keep them quiescent. 

Crimea is a microcosm of this larger problem. It has been bombarded by the Ukrainians since the beginning of the invasion to such a degree that the Black Sea Fleet had to flee Sevastopol, its storied headquarters for centuries. Ukraine has also struck Russia's Crimean air defenses, its airfields and its logistics centers which a few years helped support Russian attacks in southern Ukraine. The result is that Crimea has turned from an asset to a liability: much of its military infrastructure is in ruins, it needs troops, artillery, planes, air defenses and investment - which might more effectively be sent to other sectors - in order not to fall to the Ukrainians. But due to Ukraine's increasingly successful 'logistics lockdown' of the routes and bridges to Crimea, it has become a sinkhole of suboptimally deployed resources . JL

Stefan Korshak reports in Medium and Dmytro Basmat reports in the Kyiv Independent:

Ukraine's drone forces struck an S-400 air defense position in Kurortne and severely damaged the Black Sea Fleet Naval Aviation command center in Sevastopol. This is part of a broader campaign that has steadily degraded Russia's air defenses and logistical infrastructure across the peninsula. Several other air defense systems were degraded to pave the way for deeper attacks. Attacks also struck roads, bridges, supply depots, temporary headquarters of the Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol as well as airfields in Kacha and Saki. This is a calculated bombardment campaign aiming to cut Crimea off from the mainland logistically; ruin the Russian Crimea/Azov Sea economy, especially the summer holiday season, because tens of thousands of canceled tours can’t be spun by the Kremlin; reach a point where Russian forces north of Crimea are so poorly-supplied, they will become so weak, they will be vulnerable to an offensive and possible breakthrough.

Ukrainian Unmanned Systems Forces struck an S-400 air defense position in Kurortne and severely damaged the Black Sea Fleet Naval Aviation command center at 37 Gogol Street in Sevastopol. This is part of a broader campaign that has steadily degraded Russia's air defenses and logistical infrastructure across the peninsula. Several other localized air defense systems were targeted and degraded to pave the way for deeper attacks.  

Coordinated operations also struck temporary headquarters of the Black Sea Fleet Air Force in Sevastopol as well as airfields in Kacha and Saki, heavily impacting hangars and runways

If anyone was in doubt that cutting overland supply to Crimea is a Ukrainian strategic objective, this week should have pushed many off the fence. This review decided it was happening more than a month ago.

This week most visibly the Ukrainians returned to the old tactic of targeting bridges, or better put causeways through marshes, that connect Crimea with occupied Ukraine and eventually the mainland. There are three bridge causeways, from west to east, usually referred to as Armyansk-Perekop, and Chongar. The latter is more important because all traffic moving through the rail hub Dzhankoi, further south, connects with the Kherson region road network via Chognar.

The Ukrainians back when they had some British/French Storm Shadow/SCALP precision-guided rockets back in 2023-early 2024, had used those precision-guided weapons to blast holes in the roadway at Chonhar, forcing the Russians to do detours until the holes were fixed. The British and French had very few of these missiles to give so the Ukrainians had to be very careful about what targets they fired them at. Some of you may recall the Americans at the time that giving Ukraine too much military material might make the Russians angry and aggressive, so the hope was the Americans would give the Ukrainians long-range missiles of which the Americans had deeper supplies. The missile came but at a dribble, so in due time the Russians fixed the bottlenecks.

Then Trump came to power and Russia was designated America’s friend and excellent future business partner, and Ukraine became an evil parasite state run by a dictator (Trump’s words, not mine) that Americans should hate, so long-range missile deliveries to Ukraine from America dried up pretty much completely after that.

That state of affairs — the northern neck of Crimea is vulnerable, the Ukrainians know it, but they don’t have weapons precise and powerful enough to blow a significant hole in a reinforced concrete bridge crossing the neck at long range, so the Ukrainians concentrated the weapons they had on other targets and left the Crimea northern road bottlenecks alone, generally speaking, for the next two years. Until Sunday.

Overnight Saturday-Sunday, at least one Ukrainian drone with what appears to have been a 100+ kg. warhead, probably fused for a penetrating detonation, blew a refrigerator-sized hole in the automobile bridge over Lake Sivash in the Chongar district. Given the tech we’ve seen, the reasonable conclusion is that the Ukrainians developed a drone that traded range for extra payload, and possibly used some of the gained weight to make the drone more jamming resistant. Maybe a specially-trained pilot team flew the strike, because hitting a bridge with a big drone at the correct angle to blow a hole in it isn’t easy.

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Tarmac torn up in bridge across Sivash marsh/Azov Sea lagoon near Chongar road checkpoint into Crimea, Sunday (ZSU)

We know because the SBS told us that the 1st Special Center (formerly 414 SBS Rgt) carried out the attack, and they are the ZSU go-to unit for high responsibility, high value target attacks. So maybe it was just pilot skill.

The Russian-appointed “head” of the occupied part of the Kherson region , Vladimir Saldo, announced the bridge was unfortunately probably not going to be working again for a month, and traffic moving between Crimea and occupied Kherson territory would detour further west, via the Armyansk-Perekop route, which on your map is the Kherson-Simferopol highway, or (mostly) the N-05. 

This would already have been a logistics problem for the Russian army, under any circumstances, because its forces in Kherson and especially Zaporizhzhia region are supplied from bases in Crimea, and overnight that supply flow was reduced to one route to deliver beans and bullets to the front line: the N-05 (and its approach leg E-97). This means the entire supply for at least one (the 58th) Russian combined arms army, and part and possibly a lot of a (the 5th) combined arms army, are being fueled, armed, receiving replacements and getting crates of champagne and caviar delivered to the generals and some 25–30,000 men in southern occupied Ukraine, via a single causeway across a marsh. That’s not speculation, that’s just reality.

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A map illustrating Russia’s latest Crimea logistics issue, image by Yury Butusov

But as readers of this review and now even some mainstream readers understand, Ukraine isn’t just carrying out precision strikes on single, very vulnerable points on the Russian logistics network. Since early May a pack (am avoiding the obvious “swarm”) of other elite SBS long-range strike units (among them Nemesis, Ptakhi Madyara, Luftwaffe) have pushed the drone kill zone out of the 0–25 km. envelope from the front lines, to up to 100–150 km., and they have been concentrating on roads and particularly roads in south, occupied Ukraine leading to and from Crimea. The primary target is fuel trucks followed by military vehicles followed by civilians heavy trucks.

So unwanted Russian outcome next: That air operation attacking Russian logistics just became twice as easy, because now more targets are crowded on less road.

Since traffic moves both ways, the problem of getting supplies INTO Crimea is similarly complicated; as we noted last review the Ukrainians are hunting ferries moving between Crimea and the Russian mainland. June 1 is the traditional launch date of Russia’s summer vacation season, so, along with the trucks being concentrated on a smaller space of road, because the way the Ukrainians timed it, the Chongar strike makes it even worse. Now a tourist family wanting to visit from Crimea has to travel an extra 100 km.

And, since the top priority of the Ukrainian strikes is fuel trucks, this means that with more vehicles on less road, chances of fuel shortages increase. And that’s already a fact too: right now fuel in Crimea 20 liters a week basically by rationing, similar shortages are being reported across the Russia-controlled sides of Kherson and Zaporizhia region, and spot shortages have surfaced as far away as Rostov, Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Saldo on Sunday — without apologizing that he had promised to fix the fuel crisis by Wednesday — announced civilian traffic will be banned from the entire highway route Rostov-Mariupol-Melitopol-Crimea.

Sure, there are probably some out there who still believe all these downstream effects are either Ukrainian lies or the Ukrainians just getting lucky by accident.

Me, I am seeing a calculating bombardment campaign aiming to:

1. Generally cut Crimea off from the mainland logistically
2. Ruin the Russian Crimea/Azov Sea summer holiday season, because tens of thousands of canceled tours can’t be spun by the Kremlin, either the family can take package trip or not
3. Reach a point where Russian forces north of Crimea are so poorly-supplied, that they either will immolate themselves attacking Ukrainian defenses or, become so weak, they will be vulnerable to a substantial offensive that will retake land fast and possibly achieve breakthrough.

The timeline is probably “by early winter or earlier”, but the launch date would be when the Ukrainians calulate Russian forces in the Zaporizhahia-Kherson sector are so weakened and their supply chains so degraded, that a major offensive is possible. That moment may never come, but certainly right now it looks like the Ukrainians are working towards that point.