#20 How Ukraine Is Taking Crimea Back Without a Navy
On one night, Ukraine hit more than sixty targets across occupied Crimea. Fuel depots. Radar stations. A power plant. And a railway bridge that does not exist anymore.
Russia's answer was to stop selling gas to its own people, ration the power, and declare a state of emergency on the peninsula it swore was Russian forever.
And the clearest map of how Crimea falls was not drawn in Kyiv. It was drawn in Moscow, by a war blogger who works hand in glove with the Russian Defense Ministry. He sketched his own side's defeat, step by step, and told the Kremlin to brace for it.
For three years, Crimea was Russia's safe corner of this war. The launchpad. The trophy. The rear area nothing could touch. Tonight it is a peninsula running out of fuel, running out of power, running out of ways in, and watched over by a fleet that already packed up and ran. This is the story of how you take an island back without a navy. Stay with me.
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Start with one night, because one night tells you everything about the other side of this war, the side nobody in our media wants to talk about.
Overnight, Ukraine ran one of the biggest operations against occupied Crimea of the entire war. Ukrainian military officials say they hit more than sixty targets across the peninsula in a single night. Not sixty over a month. Sixty in the dark, in a few hours, on one piece of ground Russia has spent twelve years turning into a fortress.
The one that matters most is a railway bridge. It crosses the North Crimean Canal near a town called Razdolne. Ukraine's Special Operations Forces hit it the first night, knocked the rail line out, and dropped one of the spans straight into the water. Russia did what Russia always does. It moved in repair crews and equipment to put the bridge back. So Ukraine came back the very next night and hit it again. Their own statement says it plain: the bridge no longer exists. And that was not some country lane. That line carried heavy cargo, ammunition, fuel, supplies for the Russian army, from the mainland through Crimea and down into occupied southern Ukraine. Today it carries nothing. It is a gap in the air and a pile in the canal.
That was not the only thing burning that night. Ukraine also hit the fuel reservoirs at the Kerch power plant, a gas distribution station at Simferopol, and a high-voltage electrical substation out in the west of the peninsula. The commander of Ukraine's drone forces read off the military kills like a grocery list. Three reconnaissance and strike drones. A Nebo radar. A Pantsir air defense system. An S-300 launcher. An anti-aircraft gun. Monitoring groups clocked fresh fires at the Port Kavkaz oil terminal and at a rail station inside Kerch itself.
And here is the thing you have to understand. None of that came out of nowhere. It is the newest night in a campaign that has been building for weeks, and the order never changes. Ukraine goes after what keeps Crimea defended. Then what keeps it fueled. Then what keeps it connected. Defense, fuel, connection. Same sequence, night after night after night. It is not random. It is a recipe.
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First, You Blind It.
Take the air defenses first, because they always go first. You cannot hit the bridge while the bridge is guarded, so you kill the guards. On the night of June 21, Ukraine reported knocking out four S-400 radar stations and two Pantsir systems sitting right on the Kerch Bridge, plus two more radars near the city of Kerch. The S-400 is supposed to be the crown jewel of Russian air defense, the system Moscow brags about and sells to other dictatorships. Ukraine is swatting them off the bridge with drones that cost less than a used pickup truck. Take the shield down, and the bridge stops being something Russia can pretend is untouchable. It becomes just a long stretch of concrete and steel sitting over open water, waiting.
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Then You Burn the Fuel.
Because an army and a peninsula both run on it. That same night, Ukraine hit the oil terminal at the Port of Kavkaz on the Russian side of the strait and set its tank farm burning. On the Crimean side, less than a kilometer from the bridge, they hit the oil depot Russia uses to move fuel across the water and refuel the ferries. Both confirmed burning by geolocated footage, real video, real coordinates, not somebody's word. And they did not hit them once and move on. By June 23, the Kavkaz terminal and the Kerch depot had each been hit a second time inside a week. The Kerch depot had been on fire since Sunday. You do not let the enemy rebuild. You hit it, you let it burn, and when they bring in the fire trucks and the repair crews, you hit it again.
And this is not just a Crimea problem for Russia. It is a Russia problem for Russia. As of late June, at least fifty-five of Russia's eighty-three federal regions were reporting fuel restrictions of one kind or another, government rationing or private stations simply running dry. The largest fuel supplier to the Moscow region, the Kapotnya refinery, got hit twice in a single month and is expected to be offline until at least the end of the year. Ukraine has been reaching out and torching refineries deep inside Russia, some as far as Siberia. Gasoline production across the whole country is running an estimated ten percent lower than last year. The fires in Crimea are just the part of the bonfire you can see from the beach.
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Then You Sink the Ferries.
Freight across the Kerch Bridge has been restricted since January, because Russia is terrified of what happens if a loaded freight train gets hit on that span. So the ferries became the backup lifeline. Ukraine went after the backup. They hit the main one, the Panagia, the same ferry that open-source trackers had already caught hauling military equipment and air defense parts across to Crimea. Footage showed at least three ferries on fire at once. Russia suspended ferry service across the strait. Think about what that means. The bridge is throttled. The ferries are burning or docked. The two ways across the water are both choking at the same time, on purpose, by design.
And the bridge keeps shutting itself down without anybody having to touch it. On the night of June 22 into the 23rd, Russia closed the Kerch Bridge to road traffic for more than five hours, from just before midnight until after five in the morning. They only do that when something is in the air. So even on the nights Ukraine does not land a hit, the threat alone freezes Putin's showpiece bridge and strands everything waiting to cross it. That is reach. That is living rent-free in the enemy's head.
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Cheap Machines, Expensive Targets.
Ukraine has a name for all of this. President Zelensky calls it long-range sanctions, and he uses that phrase on purpose, because it cuts right to the money. Russia pays for this war with oil. So Ukraine burns the oil, and the depots that store it, and the terminals that move it. You want to sanction Russia? Forget the paperwork in Brussels. Light the refinery on fire. That is a sanction Moscow actually feels.
And these are not the deep strikes flown by million-dollar cruise missiles. Most of these are mid-range drones reaching what the military calls operational depth, the band roughly twenty-five to two hundred kilometers behind the front line. Crimea used to sit comfortably behind that band. It was too far back to touch. Not anymore. The peninsula now sits right inside the kill box, and it gets hit on most nights of the week.
Here is the math, and the math is the whole point. A long-range attack drone costs a few thousand dollars. The radar it kills runs into the tens of millions. The fuel depot it lights up, the refinery, the S-400 battery, those run into the hundreds of millions. Cheap machine, expensive target, night after night. You do not have to win every exchange. You just have to keep trading thousand-dollar drones for hundred-million-dollar systems, and let the arithmetic do the killing. Russia cannot buy its way out of that, and Russia cannot out-build it either, because Ukraine is hitting the factories and refineries that would do the building.
And you do not have to take Kyiv's word for any of this. The occupation's own spokesman admitted Crimea is seeing almost daily attacks on its energy grid. That is the occupier, on the record, telling you it is getting hammered. When the man holding the peninsula says he is getting hit nearly every day, you can stop arguing about whether it is happening.
So add up one night. Radars down. Fuel depots burning on both sides of the water. Ferries hit and suspended. A railway bridge erased from the earth. And the single most important supply line onto the peninsula frozen for the night while two million people stood in the dark and watched the sky.
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You do not have to take Ukraine's word for the damage either. You can just watch what Russia did about it. Because what a government does in a panic tells you more than anything it says into a microphone.
Within hours of the strikes, Crimea's occupation governor ordered every gas station on the peninsula to stop selling fuel to anyone outside the government. Not to regular people. Not to businesses. Fuel goes only to state agencies, the ones keeping essential services and security running. No date for when normal sales come back. And get this, that was not even the first step. That was the next step down. Russia had already spent weeks rationing fuel in Crimea, vouchers, purchase limits, twenty liters a customer, before it finally just cut civilians off entirely. They tried to manage the shortage quietly. When that failed, they slammed the pump shut.
Then, on June 26, the occupation declared a formal state of emergency across Crimea. Indefinite. The Russian-installed head of the peninsula, Aksyonov, said the special regime would let authorities address essential needs faster and, his word, stabilize the economy. You do not declare a state of emergency over a place you have under control. You declare it over a place that is coming apart in your hands.
In Sevastopol, the biggest city on the peninsula and the home port of the fleet, the occupation governor went further still. No fuel sales at all on June 22 and 23, except for emergency vehicles. He cut the operating hours of public transit and the big stores. Suspended ferries. Cancelled outdoor events. His own words: fuel will only go to vehicles supporting the city's operations. The rest of you, walk.
Then the lights went out. The occupation power company started rationing electricity, and residents reported outages rolling across Armyansk, Alushta, Simferopol, Sevastopol, and Dzhankoi. A Russian proxy official claimed half of Crimea was without power after the strikes. Two million people live on that peninsula, and a big share of them spent this week unable to keep the lights on or put gas in the tank. That is the reality underneath the Kremlin's talking points. Not an inconvenience. A breakdown.
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The Water Was First.
And remember what Crimea was already living with before any of this started. The occupation has spent years just trying to keep two million people supplied with the basics, water included, ever since Ukraine shut off the canal that fed the peninsula back in 2014. Russia spent the opening stretch of this war restoring that water by force, because Crimea cannot feed itself. It never could. It is a dry, hard piece of ground that has to have nearly everything shipped in across that strait. The water went first, back in 2014. Now the fuel and the power are going the exact same way. Ukraine has simply gone down the list of everything that has to be shipped in, and started breaking the things that ship it.
And the land routes are not covering the gap, because the land routes are getting hit too. With the bridge throttled and the ferries burning, Russia told freight haulers to take the long way around, up through Rostov and into occupied Mariupol, Melitopol, and Simferopol. That is the same corridor Ukraine has been pounding with its rail-bridge strikes. Ukrainian drones have reportedly established control over traffic on the main highway connecting the Rostov region to Crimea through the occupied territories. So the detour route is also a kill zone. There is no clean way in anymore. Not over the bridge, not across the water, not up the highway. Every door has a drone over it.
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The Tourists Aren't Coming.
And then there are the people, and the money. All of this is landing right as the summer tourist season opens, the season Crimea's whole economy runs on, because the peninsula lives off Russian vacationers coming for the beaches and the resorts. This year they are showing up to blackouts and dry pumps, or they are not showing up at all. Hotel bookings for July and August fell more than forty-three percent in Sevastopol compared to last year, and almost thirty-one percent across Crimea as a whole. Nearly half the bookings, gone. The children's summer camps stopped taking new arrivals. The famous Artek camp turned away kids who had already shown up for their session, sent them home. And the head of the Crimean Tatars, the native people Russia shoved aside when it seized this peninsula in 2014, told Russian citizens living there illegally to get out now, while they still can.
Zelensky put a clock on it. On June 25 he said the fuel and logistics situation in Crimea keeps getting worse, and then he approved a forty-day operation built specifically to keep the pressure on, with the stated goal of forcing Moscow to end the war. Forty days. He is not hiding the plan. He announced it.
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What They Say Versus What They Do.
Now here is the part I will put on the record because it cuts the other way, and you are going to hear it from me straight, not buried. Russia disputes the worst of these claims, and some of the wilder numbers floating around online deserve a side-eye. The occupation head of neighboring Kherson called the reports of evacuation buses and closed roads into Crimea false. And serious analysts will tell you the fuel pain, while real, is concentrated in that two-hundred-fifty-kilometer band near the front, Crimea and the occupied zones, not collapsing all of Russia. The Kremlin keeps its national gas prices propped up with a subsidy that cost it around thirty-five billion dollars last year, roughly half its entire budget deficit, precisely so ordinary Russians in Moscow do not feel at the pump what people in Crimea are feeling. So no, this is not the Russian economy falling off a cliff tomorrow. That is the honest read, and I am not going to sell you a fantasy.
But here is what the denials cannot paper over. A government that has things under control does not order its own gas stations to go bone dry. It does not declare an open-ended state of emergency over its prize peninsula. It does not ration the lights for two million people, or tell its emergency vehicles they are the only ones who get fuel, or watch half its summer tourism evaporate in a single season. The denials are words. The fuel bans, the blackouts, the emergency decree, the empty hotels, those are what they actually did. And when what a man says and what a man does point in opposite directions, I go with what he does. Every single time.
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So why pour this much fire into one peninsula? Two reasons, and neither one is complicated. The first is what Crimea is to Russia. The second is how few ways there are to reach it. Hold both in your head and the whole campaign snaps into focus.
First, what Crimea is. It is not just occupied dirt. It has been Russia's main base in the south for generations. The Black Sea Fleet has called Sevastopol home for more than two centuries, since Catherine the Great. Crimea is where Russia stages its supplies, parks its warships, and launches missiles into southern Ukraine. For the opening stretch of this war, it was the safe rear, the launchpad nothing could reach. The crown jewel of the whole 2014 land grab.
And here is the piece almost nobody in the American media has told you. That crown jewel is already broken. Ukraine, a country that started this war with essentially no navy, has driven the Russian Black Sea Fleet out of its own home port. Let that sit for a second. No navy. No carriers, no real surface fleet to speak of. And they did it anyway, with sea drones, aerial drones, and missiles.
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The List of the Dead.
Run the list, because the list is staggering. In 2022, Ukraine sank the Moskva, the fleet's flagship, the biggest warship lost in combat anywhere on earth since World War Two. They blew up half the fleet's naval aviation at the Saky airbase that same year. In 2023, Storm Shadow missiles tore into the Sevastopol shipyard and gutted the submarine Rostov-na-Donu and the landing ship Minsk. They put missiles into the Black Sea Fleet headquarters building itself, in Sevastopol, twice. They destroyed the Novocherkassk, a big landing ship, in Feodosiya at the end of 2023. This year, in April, the SBU's Alpha unit hit three more vessels in one night, the landing ships Yamal and Filchenkov and the spy ship Ivan Khurs. Last December, Ukraine used a Sea Baby underwater drone to disable a Russian submarine at Novorossiysk, the first time anybody had ever pulled that off. Over the course of the war, Ukraine has sunk or wrecked something like a third of the entire fleet.
So Russia did the only thing it could. It ran. It pulled its major warships out of Sevastopol and back to Novorossiysk, on Russia's own coast, where they sit further from Ukraine's reach. And even that was not far enough. Ukraine hit Novorossiysk with more than two hundred drones back in March, and used that Sea Baby drone right there in the harbor. There is no safe port left on Russia's side of this sea.
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The Headquarters Packs Its Bags.
And now the command itself is leaving. Pro-Ukrainian partisans inside the fleet, the Atesh movement, report that the Black Sea Fleet is drawing up plans to move its remaining command structures out of Sevastopol entirely, back to Novorossiysk. And they say some officers are not even waiting for official orders. They are quietly relocating their own families, selling off the property they cannot take with them, and resettling on the Russian mainland. Read that again. The officer corps of Russia's Black Sea Fleet is moving its wives and children off the peninsula. The men with the best information about how safe Crimea actually is have looked at the situation and decided to get their families out. That is the most honest poll you will ever see. When the fleet's own officers vote with their families, you have your answer.
The trigger, the partisans say, was a May 27 strike that hit the fleet's aviation headquarters in Sevastopol with Storm Shadow missiles. Since then, they say, the strikes only intensified and the logistics only got worse. The pride of Russian naval history, two hundred and forty years in Sevastopol, is packing up and pulling back to the mainland because a country with no navy made the home port too dangerous to live in.
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Two Doors, and Both Are Burning.
That is reason one. Now reason two, how you even get to Crimea. Russia has exactly two ways in. One is the land corridor across occupied southern Ukraine, a strip only about a hundred kilometers wide. The other is the Kerch Bridge and its ferries across the strait. That is the entire list. Two doors. Nothing else. The bridge was Putin's showpiece when it opened in 2018, the physical proof, he said, that Crimea was bolted to Russia for good. He drove a truck across it himself for the cameras. Ukraine has already hit that bridge twice, in 2022 and again in 2023, and Russia has restricted freight across it ever since out of pure fear. The ferries were the workaround. Ukraine has spent the last year sinking those too.
So here is the entire campaign in one line. Ukraine is working both doors at once, and it is winning at both. Strip the air defenses. Burn the fuel. Cut the rail. Sink the ferries. Freeze the bridge. Two doors, both on fire, and a fleet already fled out the back.
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The Map Moscow Drew on Itself.
The commander of Ukraine's drone forces said the goal out loud, in plain language. Strip Crimea of its value as a launchpad. Kill the air defenses, shrink the fleet's footprint, and choke the fuel and the transport until holding the place costs Russia more than the place is worth. And Ukraine's defense minister used the exact word for it on June 17. He said the drone campaign is turning Crimea into an island.
Now here is how you know it is landing. The clearest map of how Crimea falls did not come out of Kyiv. It came out of Moscow. A prominent pro-war Russian blogger, a man with ties to the Russian Defense Ministry, published a full diagram and write-up this week. He built it around the Crimean Bridge as the final target of the blockade of Crimea. He walked through the phases himself, in order. First the fuel collapse. Then the blackouts. Then the severed rail. And finally the bridge. He even listed the weapons he expects Ukraine to use to finish the job. Flamingo cruise missiles with thousand-kilogram warheads, and he put the stockpile at around sixty of them. Smaller FP-2 drones. Neptune missiles. Sea drones. He laid out his own country's defeat, phase by phase, on a map, and posted it.
And then he told Moscow what to do about it. His words: prepare for counteraction now. Sit with who is saying that. Not a Ukrainian general. Not some think-tank analyst in Washington. A Kremlin-aligned war blogger, looking at the same fires and the same downed radars you have heard about for the last twenty minutes, telling his own government to brace for losing the peninsula. When the enemy's own propagandist is drawing you the map of his side's collapse, the argument is over.
So put the three pieces together. The strikes take out the fuel, the radar, and the bridges, one night at a time. The squeeze leaves two million people short of gas and power, under a state of emergency, with the ones who can leave being told to leave. And the goal, written down on Moscow's own map by one of Moscow's own people, is the bridge. The fleet has already fled. The peninsula that spent this war as Russia's untouchable rear is turning into a place Russia has to feed across a single bridge it can no longer keep safe. The bridge still stands tonight. But the radars are thinner, the fuel is shorter, the ferries are fewer, the officers are moving their families, and the man drawing the map of how it ends is wearing the other team's colors.
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We just spent three segments on Russia falling apart on the outside, the peninsula, the fleet, the supply lines. Now I want to show you Russia falling apart on the inside. Because the same week Crimea was burning, a single Russian soldier did something that should make Vladimir Putin lose sleep, and it tells you the rot is not just at the edges. It is in the ranks.
His name is Alexander Lunin. A frontline veteran, a junior sergeant from the Voronezh region, a man who fought in Russia's war on Ukraine and got wounded doing it. Not a dissident, not a journalist, not some exile in London. A soldier. On June 25, he posted a video, looked straight into the camera, and addressed Vladimir Putin by name. And what he said was not a complaint about pay. He said thousands of Russian soldiers are being thrown into pits, into holes in the ground, and tortured by their own commanders. Tortured for refusing what he called stupid, suicidal orders, or for refusing to hand over bribes to their own officers. He said the men who die are getting erased, listed as missing in action so nobody has to answer for them.
And then he drew a line nobody in Russia draws out loud. He told Putin: meet me, Live on television, and let me tell you the whole truth about what is happening in this country, or the army will turn its weapons on the Kremlin. A serving Russian veteran said that, on camera, with his own face showing. Twelve million people watched it inside of a day. Twelve million.
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We Have Seen This Movie.
So what did the great, strong, fearless leader of Russia do? Did he meet the man? Did he address the torture? Did he stand in front of the cameras like the tough guy he plays on television? No. He sent his security forces in the dead of night. They raided Lunin's house. They hauled off his computers, his hard drives, anything he had. They grabbed him on the road as he was heading to Moscow. A family friend says he is alive, for now, locked up for eleven days on some administrative charge. Eleven days, for telling the truth about how Russia treats its own soldiers.
And if that story sounds familiar, it should, because we have all seen this movie before. A man embarrasses Putin in public, and not long after, something happens to that man. Ask Yevgeny Prigozhin. He ran the Wagner army, he marched his men on Moscow in 2023, the single biggest challenge to Putin's grip in a quarter century, and he was dead in a plane two months later, falling out of the sky. The Kremlin denied everything, the way it always does. Lunin is not Prigozhin. He does not have a private army. He is one wounded sergeant with a phone and a grievance. But the reflex is identical. Embarrass the strongman, and the strongman reaches for the cuffs or worse.
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A Strong Man Doesn't Do This.
Here is why this connects to everything else in this episode. A leader who is winning his war does not panic over one soldier's video. A leader who is confident does not need to raid a veteran's house at night and seize his hard drives over a complaint about torture. He does that because he is scared. He does that because the thing Lunin described, the brutality, the extortion, the men dying in holes, is real and widespread enough that twelve million people believed it on sight. And he does that because the anger inside the ranks is finally starting to outrun the fear, and Putin knows exactly what that means.
Look at the recruiting numbers underneath it. Russian enlistment is dropping even as the bonuses climb, with Moscow recruitment reportedly down about a third this spring compared to last year. They are scraping for warm bodies, signing up older men, foreigners, even prisoners, dangling reduced sentences to get convicts to the front. An army that is winning does not have to empty its jails to fill its ranks. And the whole time, the man at the top is jailing the soldiers who dare to say so out loud.
So here is the picture, the full one, inside and out. On the outside, Crimea is burning, the fleet has fled, and Moscow's own bloggers are drawing the map of the collapse. On the inside, the ranks are rotting, the recruiting is failing, and a veteran who told the truth is sitting in a cell. A confident empire does not look like this. A winning army does not look like this. This is what it looks like when the bluster starts to crack, on the peninsula and in the barracks at the same time.
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AND, THATS IT.
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That's Everyone knows. The hard truth, the stuff nobody else will say, and the thing that keeps you going.
I'm Brian Bullock of Starborne Studios. Find me on X at Everyoneknows1. If this hits you, share it with someone who needs to hear it. Subscribe. Leave a review. Come find us at brianbullockwriter.com.
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Because Everyone knows. Your Silence, is your consent.