Ukraine Says It Hit Russian Fuel Tankers Supplying Occupied Crimea

Ukraine has launched large-scale strikes against Russian tankers transporting fuel to occupied Crimea, Ukrainian officials said, as Kyiv seeks to disrupt Moscow’s military logistics on the peninsula.

The campaign follows Ukrainian strikes on Russian oil refineries, including the Omsk refinery in Siberia, Russia’s largest, located about 2,500 km (1,550 miles) from the Ukrainian border.

Ukrainian officials say the attacks have contributed to fuel shortages in Russia.

Commander of Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces, Robert Brovdi, said Ukrainian forces struck 19 Russian tankers, a cargo ship and a ferry between July 6 and July 8, including nine tankers during the night of July 7.

Ukrainian Navy spokesperson Dmytro Pletenchuk told public broadcaster Suspilne that Russia had shifted fuel deliveries to Crimea by sea after Ukraine disrupted overland supply routes.

“They had few options left. It’s either a land corridor or a sea connection,” Pletenchuk said. “As far as we know, they don’t use the Kerch Bridge for such transportation in the necessary volumes.”

The Kerch Bridge, which links Russia to Crimea, was damaged in a truck bombing in 2022 that ignited a fuel train travelling across the bridge.

President Volodymyr Zelenskiy told the Financial Times that Ukraine had shifted its focus to Crimea after disabling Russia’s oil offloading terminal at Novorossiysk on the Black Sea.

“We were slowing down the militarisation of our peninsula occupied by Russia,” Zelenskiy said.

“We cut off the logistics and took control of the fuel and energy complex.”

The Ukrainian president’s representative office in Crimea said the strikes had triggered what it described as “a management crisis” on the peninsula.

It said fuel sales to civilians had been suspended in Sevastopol and that power outages had affected more than a dozen districts.

Ukraine said it also carried out additional strikes on military targets in Crimea over the past week, including attacks on the Saky and Hvardiiske (Guardske) airfields and the Kerch oil transshipment terminal.

Russia also came under renewed drone attacks, with Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin saying Ukraine launched one of its largest drone attacks on the Russian capital in two years.

Russian authorities said they intercepted more than 400 drones headed toward Moscow on July 7, the opening day of a NATO summit in Ankara.

“When our drones weren’t flying to Moscow and St. Petersburg, Putin didn’t think much about it. He understood that the war was far from the Kremlin,” Zelenskiy told the Financial Times.

“When not a hundred drones, but a thousand would start flying to Moscow … this would be a moment like a new page on the path to ending the war,” he said.