Ukraine’s campaign against Russian logistics has left Moscow unable to effectively supply Crimea, with fuel shortages spreading and transport links into the peninsula increasingly disrupted, a senior NATO official has said.
On the sidelines of the NATO Defence Ministers’ meeting, the UK Defence Journal was told that a concerted Ukrainian effort to interdict the logistics heading into Crimea and Zaporizhzhia was now having a visible effect, with the official saying “we see that Russia can’t effectively supply Crimea now” and pointing to fuel shortages and to Russia’s increasingly “limited means for transportation” to move safely into the occupied areas.
The official said Ukrainian forces had struck bridges in northern Crimea in June, further disrupting Russian transport links, and had caused the temporary loss of rail ferries on the Kerch Strait crossing, creating fresh bottlenecks. While the Kerch bridge itself remained open, the official said its use was “almost certainly restricted” because the Russians remained deeply concerned about the prospect of the next Ukrainian strike against it.
This interdiction, the official said, was being driven by a marked improvement in Ukrainian capability, citing Ukrainian ingenuity and innovation alongside significantly improved command and control that gave Kyiv a better ability to strike along the operational depth behind the front line, much of it enabled by more effective drone technology.
A key turning point, the official said, had come once Russia could no longer make use of Starlink, after which “Russian command and control begin to degrade”, something the official assessed had amounted to a net advantage for the Ukrainians, compounding the supply problems now being felt across the occupied south.
Asked how dire the situation might become for Russian forces in Crimea, the official was cautious, saying a moment of genuine crisis was not imminent, but warned that military operations ultimately come down to logistics, and that once an occupying force cannot sustain its supply lines “you’re starting to get into some pretty big trouble”, with a degraded Russian military capability on the peninsula and growing discontent among the population there.
