By Sea, by Air, and Now by Land, Ukraine Tightens Noose Around Russia-Occupied Crimea

Ukraine’s military is tightening a noose around Crimea, the strategic Black Sea peninsula that President Vladimir Putin of Russia annexed a decade ago. The annexation in 2014 sent Mr. Putin’s poll ratings soaring as Russians celebrated their nation’s return as a warm water military power.Since then, tourism has boomed. Every summer, as much as five percent of Russia’s 144 million people ignore international sanctions and migrate south to vacation on the Black Sea beaches. Highrise hotels sprouted along the coast. Moscow real estate agents did a land-office business peddling beachfront condos.Now the party is over. Ukraine’s newly accurate drones pound access bridges daily, including on Sunday. A trickle of fuel trucks, often poorly disguised as civilian tractor trailers, move toward Crimea, sometimes taking farm roads, sometimes rolling down highways partially enclosed with anti-drone nets. On reaching the isthmus, drivers ease 18-wheelers over improvised pontoon bridges. All ferries have been blown up. Air service ended after Mr. Putin launched his big attack on Ukraine in February 2022. Passenger train service was cut last week after Ukrainian bombings, including one this month that hit a locomotive, killing an engineer. Ukraine allows Mr. Putin’s showcase $4 billion bridge to remain partially open, apparently to leave an escape route for Russian soldiers and civilians.Two weeks ago, at the start of the drone campaign, hotels tried to reverse a plunge in bookings by offering gasoline in return for reservations. Reflecting the can-do mood, one Muscovite, a wanna-be Russian Chevy Chase, filmed a selfie of packing the family car with his kids and five jerry cans of gasoline. On Sunday, Crimea’s Moscow-installed authorities decreed that gasoline can only be sold to police and soldiers. They have set up a hotline to help vacationers find gasoline to escape the peninsula. In Yalta, where Joseph Stalin met Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill in 1945, drivers were waiting in lines for as long as 10 hours to buy four gallons. As black market prices hit $10 a gallon, some vacationers are resorting to stealing gasoline from other cars.At Sevastopol, the port city founded for Catherine the Great in 1783, the remains of the Russian Navy’s Black Sea Fleet headquarters are quietly relocating to the comparative safety of Russia’s heavily fortified port of Novorossiysk, on the mainland. Teaching the world a lesson in asymmetrical warfare, Ukraine, a nation without a navy, used sea drones to sweep the Russian Navy from the Black Sea.Back on land, as missiles hit Crimean military bases daily, nervous Russian officers are training their soldiers to repel a Ukrainian amphibious landing. For their part, Ukrainian military leaders do little to dispel the Russians’ growing fear that Ukrainian marines may land this summer.“Crimea is being isolated by drones. In the near future, it appears that the Crimean peninsula will turn into an island,” Ukraine’s defense minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, said last week in an interview with the YouTube channel PRESSING. “This year, the tourist season in Crimea will only be for our drones.”“For the Russians, hell is beginning — one that’s very hard to deal with,” Mr. Fedorov, a 35-year-old “tech bro,” warned. “Logistics are being cut off. Crimea is being isolated.”Military cargo has dropped by 71 percent on the main “Novorossiya,” or New Russia, highway linking mainland Russia with Crimea, the commander of Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Force, Robert Brovdi, told Reuters last week. Predicting that his drones will exercise total ‘fire control’ over the 500-mile highway by July, he said: “We will isolate Crimea in the near future.”The New Russia highway, a prestige project of Mr. Putin’s, is now dubbed “the Highway of Death.” Major Brovdi compared taking out fuel tanker trucks on the four lane divided highway to “shooting partridges in an open field.”Starving the enemy of fuel and ammunition, Ukraine’s policy of “logistical lockdown” is reaching its logical conclusion. Russian soldiers are withdrawing from key positions on the Kinburn Spit, reported a Crimea-based, anti-Russia partisan group, Atesh. Located at the mouth of the Dnipro River, this arm of sandy land has been a Russian forward position for protecting Crimea and for attacking Ukraine’s grain export ports of Odessa region. “Judging by how the situation is developing, the coming months could be the most difficult for Russian forces in Crimea since the start of the war,” the report states.For Russians, a Ukrainian marine landing on Crimea would be the latest psychological blow by Volodymyr Zelensky, a politician who came to the presidency from a career in theater. On the morning of June 3, the first day of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, delegates to “Russia’s Davos” picked up their badges against a backdrop of towering columns of black smoke rising from a Ukrainian drone attack on the city’s maritime oil terminal.Then, one week later, as heads of state gathered on the shores of Lake Geneva for the Group of Seven summit, Ukrainian drones blasted Moscow’s sole oil refinery. To make sure foreign leaders saw that Ukraine was on a roll, Mr. Zelensky posted on social media apocalyptic videos of Moscow’s burning industrial landscape.Publicly, Russia officials are dismissive that Ukraine would ever dare to mount a landing on Crimea, a Massachusetts-size land inhabited by 2.4 million Russian passport holders.“Our Crimea is securely defended as an impregnable fortress, a second repeat of what happened in Kursk oblast will not happen” the secretary of Russia’s Security Council, Sergei Shoigu, said last week, referring to Ukraine’s eight-month incursion into a Russian border region. In that case last year, Russia had to call in North Korean troops to dislodge the invaders. Addressing Crimeans’ panic buying of sugar, rice, and buckwheat, Mr. Shoigu, a former defense minister, said of residents: “They are making an elephant out of a fly. They themselves emptied the store shelves — and now they complain that there are no products.” There are precedents for panic. Twice in history, Moscow has lost control of this strategic piece of real estate — in 1855 to an Anglo-French force in the Crimean War and in 1942 to the Germans in World War II.Today, Ukrainian drones and missiles are aided by sharpened accuracy and by failures of Russia’s air defense. During the first five months of this year, Ukraine blew up 174 Russian air defense complexes worth about $5.4 billion, Major Brovdi told Reuters last week. He posted Sunday on Telegram of his air campaign: “Crimea as a springboard for attacks on Ukraine is already a military absurdity.”“There is no other way to demilitarize the worm and smoke one million squatters out of the peninsula,” Major Brovdi said. Referring to the political potency of the peninsula, he predicted: “Crimea will bring Moscow down, this is a psychological breaking point.” In last week’s air war over Moscow, Russia’s most highly defended city, a cellphone video shows a Russian soldier firing, ineffectually, a shoulder-held missile from the side of a busy highway. Another missile misses a drone and then hits an oil reservoir blowing its roof sky high. Other cellphone videos show drones slowly and noisily scraping across suburban skies, passing over dachas and vegetable gardens.“It was a beautiful feeling when we can fly anywhere we want,” Ukrainian drone commander Yevhen Karas told the BBC last week. Speaking to the low-tech quality of some Russian air defenses, Crimea authorities last week banned night time motorcycle use on the grounds that the noise hindered air defense units trying to locate incoming drones. Last week, Muscovites were shocked by the sight of orange fires and black smoke rising on their city’s eastern horizon, only 15 miles from the Kremlin. Photos posted on social media show a black, oil rain falling on white cars. For more than four years of war, Mr. Putin has sought to shield Moscow’s politically crucial 10 million inhabitants from such a war tableau.In the bigger picture, Ukrainian drones hit a refinery on Friday located 1,200 miles east of Ukraine. Russia has lost about one third of its refining capacity, according to U.S.-based research firm Energy Intelligence. Last week, Reuters reported that Russia, the world’s third largest oil producer, will soon start importing tanker loads of gasoline by sea, from Asia.On Russian state TV, commentator Sergey Karnaukhov seemed to capture the new gloom in pro-war nationalist circles when he said of Ukrainians on a national talk show: “I’ll tell you what’s next. They will finish us off.”Correction: Franklin Roosevelt met with Stalin at Yalta in 1945. An earlier version misstated the president’s first name.

By Sea, by Air, and Now by Land, Ukraine Tightens Noose Around Russia-Occupied Crimea

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