In August 2022, almost six months after an unprovoked and criminal invasion of his country on 24 February by Vladimir Putin’s Russian military, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy laid down a marker for one of his objectives to be achieved by the end of the war.
“Crimea is Ukrainian, and we will never give it up,” he said at the time, and added, “we will not forget that the Russian war against Ukraine began with the occupation of Crimea. This Russian war…began with Crimea and must end with Crimea – with its liberation.”
Main battle tank T-14 object 148 on heavy unified tracked platform Armata. Image Credit: Creative Commons.
For almost four years, it seemed like an empty proclamation. It was dismissed by many as a slogan that could arouse patriotic impulses within the population at large, but also an ambition with very little possibility of ever coming true.
But in recent weeks, Ukrainian officials have begun to discuss scenarios that would involve the liberation of the peninsula and the displacement of the Russian occupation force that has been there for more than 12 years.
Isolating Crimea
In an 11 June interview, Robert “Madyar” Brovdi, Commander of Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces, told the Reuters news agency that he has a strategy to isolate occupied Crimea from mainland Russia. The goal of his plan is to choke off the region and force its capitulation – or at least force Russia’s military to withdraw – by destroying all the key military supply routes to the peninsula.
“We will isolate Crimea in the near future,” Brovdi told Reuters while at a command post near the front line. Brovdi said that 71 percent of the Russian military cargo traffic along the R-280 “Novorossiya” highway, which runs through Mariupol, Berdyansk, and Melitopol, has fallen or has been taken out over the past two weeks by Ukrainian drone strikes.
The Ukrainian force is now conducting the beginning of its campaign to interdict the R-280 highway that connects southern Russia, occupied Crimea, and other Ukrainian territories that are under the Kremlin’s occupation. What they are doing step by step is taking out most of the Russian logistics in Crimea and causing petrol stations to run dry.
Fuel rationing has begun in the region, and on those increasingly rare occasions where it is available, long queues form almost immediately. In the meantime, other critical items are also beginning to disappear from shelves, including all manner of food items that have been supplied from Russia for years.
T-14 Armata Tank. Image Credit: Creative Commons.
T-14 Armata. Image Credit: Russian State Media.
Making Crimea Untenable for Russia
Brovdi told the news agency that while the shortages created by striking at the main supply route into Crimea make life difficult for the local civilian population, the main objective is to make it untenable for the Russian military to continue to maintain bases and conduct operations there.
”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,” he told Reuters.
His comments were made just as Ukraine has begun to ramp up a relentless day after day set of strikes against any Russian supply routes and any military infrastructure that connects occupied Crimea to other Russian-controlled Ukraine territories.
On 11 June, a series of Ukrainian attacks struck military facilities across occupied Crimea and also seriously damaged several bridges on the overland roadways connected to the peninsula. Reports of several of these strikes came from Russian-installed officials and war-monitoring channels.
These attacks are designed to eliminate the ability of Russia to use these overland transport routes to move any personnel or military supplies into Crimea. Among the most strategically important targets has been the Chonhar Bridge, a primary link between the occupied Crimea and the areas of Kherson Oblast still occupied by Russia.
Ukraine’s drone forces hit the bridge on both 7 and 9 June. Andrii Kovalenko, who is the head of Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation, said the latest attack destroyed the bridge, eliminating another option for Russia to be able to sustain its presence in Crimea.
As an NBC story reports today, “it’s not clear if Kyiv’s plan for a ‘logistical lockdown’ of Russian operations in this occupied Ukrainian territory could shift the overall dynamics of the four-year war, but it’s already turning into a public relations nightmare for the Kremlin as it faces growing domestic discontent.”
The Ukrainians are definitely changing all previous assumptions about Crimea.
As a former Russian military officer and lawmaker wrote recently on his Telegram channel, “some people think Crimea is just a resort. It’s not. Today, it’s a front-line region.”
About the Author: Reuben F. Johnson
Reuben F. Johnson has thirty-six years of experience analyzing and reporting on foreign weapons systems, defense technologies, and international arms export policy. Johnson is the Director of Research at the Casimir Pulaski Foundation. He is also a survivor of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. He worked for years in the American defense industry as a foreign technology analyst and later as a consultant for the U.S. Department of Defense, the Departments of the Navy and Air Force, and the governments of the United Kingdom and Australia. In 2022-2023, he won two awards in a row for his defense reporting. He holds a bachelor’s degree from DePauw University and a master’s degree from Miami University in Ohio, with a specialization in Soviet and Russian studies. He lives in Warsaw.
