Ukraine ‘cuts off’ Crimea from Russia, plunging it into an energy crisis
Ukraine is ramping up short-, medium- and long-range drone production to bring Russia’s war to a standstill. Crimea’s energy crisis deepened during the past week
Ukraine is ramping up short-, medium- and long-range drone production to bring Russia’s war to a standstill. Crimea’s energy crisis deepened during the past week, as Ukraine demonstrated it could exercise fire control over the peninsula to cut off its fuel and electricity, and Russian occupation authorities said there was no schedule for a return to normality despite Moscow’s help. Ukraine’s operation, named “Molochka”, began on July 6. Ukraine’s commander of unmanned forces, Robert “Madyar” Brovdi, said it “paralyzes the feeder fleet of Russian courier tankers”, in comments on his Telegram messaging channel. These flat-bottomed tankers and barges ferry oil from the shallow waters of the Volga-Don Canal and Sea of Azov to larger tankers waiting in the Black Sea on the other side of the Kerch Strait, he said. “It essentially prevents the export of ‘black gold’,” said Brovdi, and “restricts the delivery of scarce gasoline to Crimea via the narrow channel of the shallow Sea of Azov, leaving the main and very dangerous method of delivery as rail and road tank cars.” During the first 10 days of the operation until July 16, Brovdi said, Ukraine had struck 147 tankers of the Russian shadow fleet. The majority, 117, were feeder tankers in the Sea of Azov. The rest were in the Black Sea. By Monday, July 13, Brovdi declared that “movement through the strait has been stopped,” and unloading of oil to Crimea “has been reduced to a minimum”. Crimean occupation governor Sergey Aksyonov admitted the state of emergency in a public post, saying, “We cannot guarantee daily sales of gasoline at gas stations, nor can we provide precise schedules for fuel distribution.” He said fuel shortages “will likely continue for some time”, despite Russian President Vladimir Putin’s approval of subsidies to the peninsula. On the night of July 13, Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) also struck several ferries used to transport military materiel across the Kerch Strait, as well as oil storage and trans-shipment points. “The simultaneous striking of dozens of targets in various remote locations in a single night indicates that the SBU is increasing the scale of its long-range special operations,” it said.
Ukraine also targeted the Crimean electricity supply, striking the Saky thermal power plant on July 9, five electricity substations on July 10 and nine more substations and the Kuban-Crimea electricity transfer point in Russia on July 13. “There will be no precise schedules for electricity delivery,” said Aksyonov. “A deep and total blackout is inevitable,” said Brovdi. Crimean occupation authorities were switching off street lighting to conserve energy, and distributing generators to communities that had been without power the longest. Aksyonov also said he was distributing 4,000 free canisters of pressurised gas to households over a period of a week. He announced a series of emergency measures to help businesses, including a discount on public land leases, a deferral of payments until November, a deferral of loan repayments and a programme of microloans. Crimea seems set for more suffering, however, as Ukraine’s campaign appears to be mounting. The strikes against it and the Sea of Azov are part of a campaign of mid-range strikes begun this year to starve Russia’s front line of fuel and weapons, and the Kremlin of export revenue from fossil fuels. Ukrainian commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrskii said there had been 7,028 successful mid-range strikes in 2026, but the campaign has clearly only just taken off, with 2,000 of those strikes taking place in May and almost double that number – 3,800 – in June, according to Syrskii; and Ukraine clearly has greater ambitions. On July 7, Russia said Ukraine tried to blow up the main compressor station on its TurkStream gas pipeline, which supplies 16.5 billion cubic metres of gas to Turkiye a year, and has a similar capacity designed to serve Southeast Europe. Gazprom, the pipeline’s owner, said it thwarted three similar attacks in March and April. “What the Ukrainian regime is doing isn’t even piracy any more,” said Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov to reporters in Moscow. “This is pure terrorism.” Ukraine’s economic war Yet Ukraine says its campaign has very specific goals. It has also sustained a campaign of long-range strikes deep inside Russia, designed to shut down its fuel refining capacity and bring its war machine and economy to a standstill.
The BriefWire