Few believed that Crimea, Russia’s chief trophy, could become a vulnerable point — yet key supply lines are now under mounting pressure
Can Ukraine win the war? The answer depends on what we even mean by victory. If it means a swift march of the Ukrainian army toward Sevastopol, the collapse of the Russian state, and a return to the 1991 borders in one great final offensive, that scenario still belongs more to the realm of someone’s optimism than to concrete strategy. If, however, victory is defined differently — as Ukraine’s ability to deny Russia, over the long term, the achievement of its main war aims, to make the occupation “too expensive,” logistically insecure and increasingly politically uncomfortable — then Kyiv today has a far clearer theory than it did a year or two ago.
For the first time since the start of the Russian invasion — and for some time now — Ukraine appears to be the side that has shaped a coherent strategy. It no longer relies primarily on a frontal breakthrough, the kind that proved tragically costly in the failed 2023 summer counteroffensive. Instead, it is focused on the “strategic neutralization” of Russian military power: strikes on refineries, fuel depots, precision-weapons production, and the elements that link the Russian presence in Crimea with southern Ukraine. But can that “thick link” actually be broken?
Ukraine has already shown that a war against a larger power need not be fought symmetrically. Russia’s Black Sea Fleet was not destroyed in a classic naval battle, but was pushed back from Sevastopol through a series of strikes and drone attacks to the point where its political and military value has been seriously undermined. Former Ukrainian defense minister Andriy Zagorodnyuk described this approach back in 2025 as an attempt to make “Russian aggression operationally meaningless” — in other words, there’s no need to necessarily “defeat Russia” in a total sense, but rather to systematically deny it the ability to achieve its war aims.
In Crimea, the most ambitious form of that logic is now on display. Kyiv is trying to turn the peninsula into a logistical island. Strikes are aimed at the routes linking Crimea to Russia and the occupied territory via Melitopol and Mariupol, especially the corridor known as the Novorossiya highway, while the Kerch Bridge has already, since earlier attacks, been under stricter restrictions and offers reduced reliability for military supply. As has been visible for days now, Ukrainian strikes are targeting transport links, ferries, oil facilities, and storage depots, with visible consequences for fuel, tourism, and everyday life on the peninsula.
In that sense, the question “can Ukraine cut Crimea off from Russia?” needs to be split into two parts. Can it temporarily, partially, and painfully isolate it? Probably yes, at least in certain periods and along certain routes. Can it cut it off completely, so that Russian forces on the peninsula are left without fuel, ammunition, and food to the point that Moscow is forced to abandon Crimea? That is a much bigger leap. Ukrainian strikes have already caused fuel-supply disruptions, energy problems, and hit key facilities around the Kerch Strait, but military history teaches that logistical pressure has to be constant, deep, and long-lasting to grow into strategic collapse. That’s the key to this strategy: the temporary would have to become “more permanent” for truly major results to follow.
And Russia is not a static target. It adapts — relocating air defenses, using smaller convoys, civilian vehicles, concealed fuel tanks, and whatever else it can think of, because this is now a situation in which it, too, has to improvise to the maximum.
Reuters has reported in recent days that Russian forces are trying to jam Ukraine’s “medium-range” drones using systems that attack Starlink connections, while Ukrainian commanders themselves admit that Moscow is increasingly hiding supplies in civilian trucks, on smaller roads, and in improvised depots. That doesn’t cancel out Ukraine’s success, but it shows that even new technology doesn’t automatically translate into a magic solution.
Still, Ukrainian pressure on Russian energy infrastructure is clearly having an effect. The strike on the refinery in Omsk, deep in Siberia, is one of the longest-range Ukrainian attacks since the start of the war — this is Russia’s largest refinery, located roughly 2,700 kilometers from Ukrainian positions. A few days later, the refinery in Saratov halted processing after a drone strike, while similar strikes have already caused fuel shortages, lines at gas stations, and export restrictions.
That is a real pain point for Moscow. The Russian economy can withstand far more than was often predicted in the West, but fuel is an essential ingredient of modern warfare. A few days ago, Russia introduced a ban on diesel exports in order to stabilize the domestic market following systematic Ukrainian attacks on refineries, while drivers in several regions wait hours to fill up.
But this is also where the limits of Ukraine’s strategy appear. Disrupting Russia’s war machine is not the same as breaking it. Russia still commands great strategic depth, considerable manpower, large stockpiles of missiles, and a willingness to absorb losses that many other states would find politically very hard to survive.
Ukraine can prove that Russia is vulnerable, but that is still no guarantee that Russian political will is going to collapse. In fact, the outcome could go the other way.
The Sea of Azov is no longer a Russian backwater: “76 vessels hit” — but how many were actually destroyed?
The latest Ukrainian figures sound almost unbelievable: the commander of Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces, Robert Brovdi, claims that in under a week, as many as 76 Russian tankers, cargo ships, tugboats, and other auxiliary vessels were hit in the Sea of Azov. In the strikes on the night of July 11 alone, the Ukrainian military reports 21 tankers hit, four tugboats, two cargo ships, and one channel-maintenance dredger. This is said to be the largest concentrated Ukrainian operation against Russian maritime logistics to date.
Even so, the word “hit” should not automatically be read as “destroyed.” Available footage does show strikes, fires, and explosions on individual vessels, but in most cases it’s not possible to determine from them whether the ships sank, were permanently disabled, or will sail again after repairs. Even Western media say they have been unable to “independently confirm” Ukraine’s overall tally, while Russian authorities have acknowledged strikes on a considerably smaller number of vessels. In one instance Moscow stated that two empty tankers had been hit, and after the most recent wave it acknowledged an attack on four vessels, including a methanol tanker. The figure of 76 should therefore, for now, be treated as Ukraine’s wartime estimate rather than a final tally of the destroyed fleet.
It is also questionable whether every vessel hit can fairly be called part of Russia’s “shadow fleet.” Many of these ships are not the huge ocean-going tankers that carry Russian oil to India or China, but relatively small vessels of around 7,000 tons deadweight, built for the shallow Sea of Azov and for carrying gasoline, diesel, and other refined products to Crimea. Reuters reports that among the first vessels identified, only two were under international sanctions. Of course, for Ukraine’s strategy their formal classification isn’t really decisive — what matters more is that they take part in supplying Crimea.
The strongest evidence of the strikes’ real impact isn’t Ukrainian statistics, but Russia’s own reaction. Moscow temporarily suspended shipping through the Don–Azov canal and stopped accepting requests to pass through the Kerch Strait. That hit not only Crimea’s supply lines but also a significant share of Russia’s grain exports — nearly a quarter of Russian wheat exports are estimated to pass through the Sea of Azov. The mere fact that Russian authorities had to shut down such an important transport route shows that the threat can no longer be reduced to a few spectacular clips of ships on fire.
Ukraine is thus trying to achieve with Azov what it already achieved against the Black Sea Fleet — it doesn’t need to sink every Russian ship if it can make sailing there dangerous, slow, and too expensive. Every tanker now needs protection, air defense, rerouting, extra insurance, and a crew willing to sail through an area where the ship itself is a target. If strikes continue at this intensity, the Sea of Azov could turn from a protected Russian inland basin into a contested war zone.
This still isn’t a full naval blockade of Crimea. Russia can repair ships, move fuel overland, introduce convoys, and deploy additional air defense. But Kyiv has shown that it no longer needs to destroy the Kerch Bridge to bring traffic through the Kerch Strait to a temporary halt. It’s enough to create the belief that the next tanker might not make it to its destination.
It’s even less certain that losing Crimea would automatically bring down Putin, as some hope. In Kyiv there is, understandably, a temptation to view Crimea as a powerful symbol whose loss would have a devastating effect on Russian political power. Crimea genuinely was one of the pillars of Putin’s legitimacy after 2014, a kind of post-Soviet trophy through which Moscow claimed to have ended an era of humiliation. But the Russian state has already shown it’s capable of turning setbacks into a narrative of a fortress under siege. The withdrawal from Kherson in 2022 was a military humiliation, but it did not produce political collapse. That doesn’t mean the Kremlin could survive losing Crimea just as easily — but there’s no automatic link between the two.
Ukraine, moreover, doesn’t depend solely on its own ingenuity. The entire theory of “strategic neutralization” rests on time, industrial output, and money. At the Ankara summit, NATO pledged €70 billion for military equipment, aid, and training for Ukraine in 2026, with a commitment to maintain at least the same level of support in 2027. That’s a massive political and material injection, but also a reminder that Ukraine’s strategy isn’t autonomous — it lives on the rhythm of Western budgets, elections, industrial capacity, and shifting moods in Washington, Berlin, Paris, and Brussels. For Ukraine, the West genuinely does have to stay “collective” for it to keep fighting at this pace.
Ukraine “can win,” but only if victory is redefined to mean not a grand Russian capitulation, but the long-term denial of a Russian victory. It can turn Crimea into an ever more expensive and insecure military space, can periodically choke it logistically, can force Moscow to choose between defending a symbol and defending a functioning war economy. But fully “severing” Crimea from Russia — in the sense of a permanent military cutoff and a forced Russian withdrawal — remains extremely difficult without a broader collapse of Russian lines in the south or a serious political crisis in Moscow.
That’s the paradox of this war. Ukraine today is more technologically dangerous than ever — the Russians are well aware of that too — yet it remains weaker in classic terms of raw power. Russia is still enormous, even if it no longer looks untouchable. Kyiv has found a way to strike where it genuinely hurts Moscow, but it hasn’t found a reliable mechanism for turning that pain into an end to the war. So the war may not be approaching a spectacular resolution, but rather a new phase — one in which victory will be measured not in kilometers of territory liberated or seized, but in whose system first loses the capacity to sustain the very strategy it chose.
About the Author
Mario Hoffmann is an independent analyst and writer covering global economics, geopolitics, and international affairs. With a background in history and politics, he writes for EconoPuls to provide in-depth context on the stories shaping our world.
