UKRAINE is using its expanding fleet of attack drones to choke vital supply routes into Crimea, causing gasoline shortages and disrupting the summer holiday season as the Ukrainians try to cut the peninsula off entirely from Russia.
When Moscow illegally annexed Crimea in 2014, its precarious geographical position, physically detached from Russia proper, posed a raft of challenges.
After the full-scale invasion of Ukraine eight years later, the Kremlin justified the war in part as a mission to take territory in southern Ukraine that would give Russia a “land bridge” to Crimea, providing reliable supply routes.
Now, Ukraine is pounding those routes.
It has struck scores of trucks and trains along the main highway leading to Crimea and hit bridges connecting the peninsula to Russian-occupied Ukraine.
Social media has been filled with videos of fuel trucks on fire after drone attacks and of lines of cars snaking around gas stations as deliveries have been disrupted.
One photographer documented on social media how she spent eight hours in line at night to get gas.
Robert Brovdi, commander of Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces, compared strikes on Russian military vehicles travelling along the exposed highway to “shooting partridges in an open field”.
The strikes are a major component of what Ukraine is calling a “logistics lockdown”.
Crimea is the primary logistical hub and staging ground for Russian military operations across southern Ukraine.
Isolating the peninsula from Russia, analysts say, could hobble Moscow’s forces on the parts of the front that have been the most fluid in recent months, with Ukrainian troops mounting successful counterattacks.
Crimea also holds great symbolic and political value to the Kremlin. Interrupting supply lines shatters the illusion of security there, showing that Russia cannot protect a prize possession.
The routes Ukraine is targeting carry crucial supplies both for the military and for civilians. The attacks on fuel trucks have led to rationing, and sales have at times stopped entirely.
Tourists, who travel to Crimea in large numbers for the peninsula’s climate, landscape and history, often arrive from Russia by car. Some have been briefly trapped there by the gas crisis.
When Russian travel blogger Anna Bunina went to Crimea on vacation at the end of May, she said online that she was looking forward to “sightseeing, driving around the peninsula and enjoying local wine”.
Instead, her trip turned into a “quest for gasoline”, she complained in a viral post that showed one empty gas station after another, their fuel price signs turned off.
While there is no evidence of food shortages, some Crimeans appear to have snapped up goods in panic buying, with shelves stripped of sugar, rice and pasta at some supermarkets.
Daily life on the peninsula has turned into a “quest for hunting for gas or cheap sugar”, said a resident of northern Crimea who asked not to be named because of possible repercussions from Russian authorities.
The attacks on Crimea-bound fuel trucks have forced drivers to think twice before making the journey.
Damage to two bridges connecting occupied Ukraine to the peninsula has also constricted traffic. Recent satellite images showed a pontoon bridge that Russia had put up after one bridge sustained critical damage.
Overall, traffic on the main highway leading to the peninsula, a road that Russia calls Novorossiya, or “New Russia”, has fallen by two-thirds since Ukraine began its campaign, Brovdi said.
The only connection for vehicles and trains between Crimea and Russia itself is a bridge over the Kerch Strait that Moscow built at a cost of US$7.5bil and opened in 2018.
Fuel deliveries on that bridge have been prohibited since a Ukrainian car bombing in the fall of 2022 set fuel tanks ablaze and badly damaged the structure.
Russia’s last railway ferry to Crimea was destroyed in April, and a small oil terminal on the peninsula’s southern coast has been hit in several Ukrainian drone strikes in recent weeks.
As Ukraine ramps up drone production, the military is outfitting them with upgraded engines, batteries and guidance systems.
In May, Ukraine launched twice as many strikes, at least 50km from the front line, as they did in April, according to Mykhailo Fedorov, the Ukrainian defence minister.
Brovdi said Ukraine hoped to gain “full control” of the Novorossiya highway soon.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has not commented on the supply crunch in Crimea.
His spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, has sought to play down the shortages, describing them as an “unfounded rush” on goods.
When Russia annexed the peninsula, Moscow’s pitch to Crimeans was that it would bring wealth to residents whose livelihoods often depend on tourism.
Until now, Crimea had been largely insulated from the war, attracting millions of tourists every year, almost all from Russia.
For the first time since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the summer holiday season in Crimea is in doubt.
Nearly 80% of bookings in the last week of May and first week of June were cancelled, according to data from a Russian travel bookings software company.
Some Crimean business owners themselves have recommended that tourists stay away.
“I would advise against going to Crimea this year because there are way too many issues right now,” Marina Vorobyova, a 66-year-old life coach who offers a summer rental in the countryside, said in a social media post.
On top of the gas shortages, she cited “sirens that go off every two or three hours”.
Irina Bogovich, a winemaker from Crimea, said in a video post that she knew she was “shooting myself in the foot” by asking visitors not to come.
“We all are looking forward to hosting tourists, but life is more precious than money,” she said.
“Coming here right now is like playing Russian roulette.” — ©2026 The New York Times Company
This article originally appeared in The New York Times
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