National Interest

by David Kirichenko

    Kyiv is forcing Moscow to choose whether to devote air defense resources to defending the Russian homeland or occupied Crimea.

    Russia’s war against Ukraine began in 2014 with the seizure and annexation of Crimea. Since the full-scale invasion in 2022, the peninsula has served as a critical staging ground for operations in southern Ukraine. For Kyiv, degrading Russia’s position there has become a central strategic objective.

    Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Kremlin has never accepted Crimea as settled Ukrainian territory. In 1994, Ukraine moved decisively to stop Russian-backed separatist leader Yuriy Meshkov from pulling the peninsula out of Kyiv’s orbit. The 2003 Tuzla Island Crisis showed that the Kremlin had not abandoned the effort, foreshadowing the larger confrontation to come.

• Ukraine’s Return to Crimea

    Even before 2022, Ukraine’s military intelligence service, known as the Main Intelligence Directorate (HUR), identified Crimea as a persistent threat. Ukrainian intelligence pushed for more aggressive operations well before the full-scale war, even as Washington tried to manage the risks of escalation. As one US official later said, “We always had to respect those red lines. But they hated that we had so many red lines.”

    In August 2016, a Ukrainian military intelligence team, reportedly led by Kyrylo Budanov, who would later lead the organization, carried out a covert raid into occupied Crimea. Russian authorities said the clash left multiple Russian security personnel dead, alarming both Washington and Moscow. Then-Vice President Joe Biden warned Kyiv that “it cannot come close to happening again,” while Russian President Vladimir Putin vowed Russia would “not let such things slide by.”

    Since 2022, Kyiv has intensified efforts to weaken Russia’s grip on what Putin treats as both a strategic asset and a symbol of Russian power. The October 2022 attack on the Kerch Bridge marked a turning point. A truck bomb detonated on the bridge, igniting a fuel train, damaging key spans and inspiring a viral Ukrainian song mocking the bridge’s supposed invulnerability.

    Ukraine has continued to target the bridge and its supporting infrastructure. “Despite numerous Russian attempts to secure the peninsula-based assets, Ukrainian drones still manage to inflict destruction,” said Samuel Bendett in an interview with the author, an adjunct senior fellow with the Center for a New American Security.

    In April, Ukrainian military intelligence claimed strikes on two landing ships and a radar station in Sevastopol Bay, underscoring the vulnerability of even heavily defended naval assets. Later that month, Ukrainian naval forces reportedly struck patrol boats guarding the Kerch Bridge crossing.

    “It’s likely that no matter what kind of layered defenses the Russian military may have there, Ukraine’s military will find a combination of systems and tactics to take that on,” said Bendett. Ukrainian naval drones have been highly active along the Black Sea coast off Crimea since 2023. Serhii Kuzan, chair of the Ukrainian Security and Cooperation Center, said in an interview that Russia has committed extensive resources to protecting the bridge.

    Ukraine has already demonstrated the impact of this approach at sea. By early 2026, roughly 30 percent of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet had been destroyed or seriously damaged, according to Ukraine’s Defense Ministry, forcing Moscow to pull key assets away from Crimea. Ben Hodges, a former commander of US Army forces in Europe, argued early in the war that Crimea should first be isolated, then made untenable as a Russian military sanctuary.

• Ukraine Is Opening Gaps in Russia’s Defenses

    Ukraine has pursued a broader effort to neutralize Russian air defenses across Crimea. Strikes on radar systems, air defense batteries and logistics nodes have gradually reduced the density of Russian coverage.

    As Taras Kuzio, a professor of political science at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, said to the author, “Ukraine is destroying Russian air defenses everywhere, not just Crimea, to create safe passage corridors for medium- and long-range strikes behind Russian lines.” Among Russian systems, the Tor air defense system appears to be the most frequent target of FP-2 drone strikes. The goal is not merely to destroy individual systems, but to make the peninsula increasingly difficult for Russia to use as a secure rear base.

    Much of that pressure is being driven by HUR, Ukraine’s military intelligence. One HUR drone unit, known as the “Ghosts,” has emerged as a key force behind the campaign in Crimea, specializing in mid-range strikes against high-value targets. Their operations have focused on some of the most valuable components of Russia’s air defense network, including S-300 and Buk systems, early-warning radars and command vehicles.

    “Striking the radars first is crucial since they are the most important, expensive and hardest to replace components of any air defense network,” said Luke Coffey, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, in an interview. “With Crimea, I think Ukraine is playing the long game, chipping away at Russian defenses bit by bit.” Open-source data show the scale of that pressure: nearly half of Ukraine’s mid-range strikes have targeted Russian air defense systems.

    Dimko Zhluktenko of Ukraine’s 413th Unmanned Systems Regiment said in an interview with the author that Ukrainian drones are especially effective in this kind of campaign because the battlefield rewards rapid adaptation between measures and countermeasures. Ukrainian manufacturers can quickly adjust designs based on direct frontline feedback, while large-scale production helps Kyiv sustain the tempo of mid-range and deep-strike operations at a lower cost.

    In recent months, Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces have also increased their targeting of Russian surface-to-air missile, radar and electronic-warfare systems across. Open-source analyst Kyle Glen counted nearly 80 such strikes across Russia and the occupied territories in March and April, an increase of around 300 percent compared to the level seen at the end of 2025.

    The Tochnyi collective project, which tracks Russia’s war against Ukraine, noted in a March 2026 report that Crimea accounted for 100 of the 173 confirmed and geolocated Ukrainian strikes it identified. The report also concluded that “since early 2025, Ukraine’s effort has focused on attriting the air defense capabilities of the Russian forces in Crimea.”

    The Kyiv Independent reported in March, citing a source in Ukraine’s domestic security agency, that “the SBU’s systematic special operations in Crimea are aimed at destroying the military infrastructure that Russia uses to attack Ukraine.”

    Ukrainian FP-2 drones also reportedly struck Kirovske air base last month, destroying four Russian Orion drones, a P-37 radar and damaging base infrastructure, showing how Kyiv is using heavier mid-range drones to hit Russia’s rear.

    “At first, nearly all Ukrainian attacks failed, then gradually over time they became more successful,” said open-source analyst Andrew Perpetua in an interview with the author. “In the beginning we saw very large Ukrainian drone attacks where nearly every drone would get shot down but 1-2 pieces of air defense might get damaged.”

    Russia has invested heavily in new military-linked infrastructure across occupied southern Ukraine, particularly around Mariupol, to create alternative supply corridors to Crimea and reduce dependence on the Kerch Bridge. But Ukrainian strikes are increasingly reaching those routes as well. After saying Ukrainian drones were patrolling roads up to 160 kilometers behind Russian lines, Ukraine’s Azov Corps wrote: “Azov returns to Mariupol.”

    As newer systems like the Hornet AI drone expand Ukraine’s ability to target logistics deeper behind the front, Moscow could be forced to place renewed reliance on the Kerch crossing, which it spent years trying to make less essential.

    This systematic approach is enabling a new phase of operations in which drones and precision strikes can penetrate deeper into the peninsula more frequently. “Ukraine’s strategy against Russian air defense has always been aimed at causing damage over a very long period of time,” said Perpetua. The result is not an immediate collapse of Russian control, but a steady erosion of its defensive architecture.

    As former Ukrainian defense minister Andriy Zagorodnyuk has noted, mid-range strike drones allow Ukraine to maintain constant pressure on Russian forces, complicating their movement and coordination without requiring full air dominance.

• Crimea as a Source of Leverage

    One OSINT analyst wrote on X that “Russia can either choose to abandon the peninsula as a strategic weapons and logistics base or it can keep feeding irreplaceable systems to Ukrainian UAVs.”

    Even Russian war bloggers have acknowledged the shift. Alexander Kharchenko lamented that Ukraine had “mobilized its modest resources,” embraced drone technology and was now “striving with all its might toward a robot war.”

    Alexander Drozdenko, the governor of Leningrad Oblast, recently described his region as “a front-line region” after repeated Ukrainian attacks on energy and port infrastructure. Located roughly 1,000 kilometers (621 miles) from Ukraine, the region illustrates Russia’s larger problem: the country is simply too vast to defend everywhere. “Through long-range drones, cruise missiles, maritime systems and special operations, Ukraine has repeatedly hit the economic backbone of Russia’s war effort,” said Hodges in an interview.

    Every system moved to protect distant oil terminals, ports and Moscow narrows Russia’s defensive margin elsewhere. “The attacker is systematically depleting air defenses,” wrote the Russian Telegram channel Rybar, which has over 1.5 million subscribers. “However, the objective may not only be to strike the parade itself, but also to force Russian forces to redeploy air defense systems closer to Moscow to protect the capital.”

    As Ukrainian drones extend their reach, even the Kremlin must account for the possibility that the war can intrude into Russia’s most protected spaces. Reports of tightened security around Putin and expanded anti-drone measures in Moscow point to the same reality: distance is no longer protection.

    In October 2022, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky stated that the war began with Crimea and will end with its liberation. Ukraine’s campaign is now turning that political claim into a military strategy. It may also give Kyiv a stronger card in future peace negotiations. If pressure on Crimea grows to the point that Moscow must consider whether the peninsula remains sustainable as a military hub, Ukraine would have gained leverage far more meaningful than holding small areas of Russian territory in Kursk.

    The Kremlin now faces a problem with no easy answer. It can reinforce Moscow and leave Crimea more exposed, or protect the peninsula while accepting greater vulnerability closer to the capital. Ukraine does not need to force a collapse. It only needs to keep forcing that choice.