Crimea, the territory that Putin has been most determined to hold on to throughout this war.
And it isn’t merely a playground for the Russian elite.
It is an unshakable political and military hub for the entire Putin regime.
Yet Putin is paying a staggering price to cling to it.
Because recently, Ukraine’s special forces carried out a series of operations that in just a few weeks destroyed everything that underpinned Putin’s authority in Crimea.
And the most significant phase of these operations came on July 1st, 2026 with the destruction of strategic military air bases in Crimea.
Nearly a dozen fighter and bomber jets were neutralized at the Saki and Belbec bases.
And this will change many things because as a peninsula, this strategic piece of land was entirely dependent on the effectiveness of its air power.
Without this support, there would be virtually nothing left to defend the critical land connections in Crimea and the military units protecting them.
The Russian Navy had already completely withdrawn from the peninsula and Putin was maintaining his last military authority there through the Saki, Belbec, and Vardis military air bases.
Russian tactical aircraft took off from these bases to rain missiles and bombs down on Ukraine and provide air support to Russian forces on the southern front.
However, in the summer of 2026, Ukraine special forces, including the SBU’s Alpha Unit, the 42nd Regiment’s Spartan Battalion, and Azovv’s drone battalion, among several other elite drone units.
They’re weaving a siege, dismantling everything that props up Putin’s authority in Crimea, its land, sea, and rail links, its fleet, its fuel, its power grid, all without a single soldier setting foot on the ground.
So, how did Ukraine neutralize one of the world’s most heavily fortified peninsulas without deploying a single soldier? We’ll unpack step by step.
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It takes only a few seconds.
Under the steel roof of a hanger, a Su30SM fighter jet burst into flames.
What hit it was no cruise missile and no war plane.
A small Ukrainian drone that had pierced the night and traveled hundreds of kilome.
A jet worth 30 to50 million reduced to ash while parked by a machine costing a few thousand.
And it didn’t end with a single jet.
The blow came in two waves.
The first on June 24th, the SBU’s elite alpha unit struck four hangers at Saki with five confirmed hits.
Those hangers held SU30 and SU30s SM fighters.
A week later, on July 1st, the second wave landed.
This time, seven hangers holding not only SU30Ms and SU30s, but SU24 frontline bombers with at least seven aircraft destroyed or damaged.
That same night, two more hangers at Havadiska airfield, a Shahhead drone depot, were leveled.
The very nest of the Shahheads that batter Ukrainian cities by night, fell into the same net.
All of it forms part of a 40-day influence operation Zalinski approved on June 25th to force Russia to the table.
Saki is home to the Russian Navy’s 43rd Independent Naval Attack Aviation Regiment.
Satellite imagery confirmed the toll.
Six of seven hardened shelters damaged, four with their doors blown clean off.
The economics of this exchange are a nightmare for Russia.
On one side, a field-built drone costing a few thousand.
On the other, a war plane worth 30 to 50 million that takes years to build.
And these hits are no accident.
For a drone to know which hanger holds which jet across an entire airfield takes deep current intelligence.
The right hanger is identified first.
Then the drone is brought down onto the exact point beneath that steel roof.
Here, one detail gives away the direction of the entire war.
Modern air forces shelter their aircraft in hardened blastresistant bunkers.
Russia has historically kept its planes on open runways or in unarmored hangers scattered across its vast territory.
That endless geography was its shield.
In a war where drones reach hundreds of kilometers, that shield has cracked.
In the SBU’s own words, “No hanger or depo can protect the enemy any longer.
The service reaches them everywhere.
” These bases were no random choice.
Saki and Hvadiska were the backbone of Russian air power in Crimea.
Russian tactical jets took off from here to rain missiles and bombs on Ukraine and to give air cover to Russian groupings on the southern front.
Consider what was lost.
The SU30SM is a multi-roll, relatively modern strike fighter.
The SU24 is a classic frontline bomber, a workhorse that hauls bombs onto Ukrainian positions.
Burning these jets in their hangers severs at the source.
Both Russia’s ability to strike Ukraine and its ability to hold the South.
And this is no one-off bad night.
Saki was hit twice in short order, and the other bases are under the same strain.
Russia’s tactical air power on the peninsula is being melted down not in a single blow but hanger by hanger.
A slow erosion that leaves far more lasting damage than any single spectacular explosion.
And it didn’t end with saki.
In the final days of June at nearby Belbeck air base, another Russian jet, a Mig 29 was destroyed by drone.
The same strike also took out a launch vehicle servicing the aircraft.
In the first days of July, more than 40 power distribution substations across Crimea were struck with heavy warhead FP2 Kamicazi drones.
16 substations were hit in just 48 hours and over 30 within a few days, leaving much of the peninsula living on scheduled power 8 to 10 hours a day.
Fires broke out at Kirch’s key ferry terminal.
Occupation administrations were ordered to evacuate their valuable documents and some officials fell ill and fled to the mainland in a hurry.
Some Russian observers now suggest the peninsula could face a full-scale humanitarian crisis in July and even that the Kirch bridge itself could be struck.
That single burning hanger at Saki was only the first frame of a far larger wave.
What makes Saki truly significant though is not that it was a single raid.
It’s the visible tip of a far broader strategy.
Ukraine knew it could not break Russia’s air superiority with conventional fighters.
Instead, using drones, it built what analysts call local air superiority, freedom of maneuver at will over Russian controlled airspace and ground.
And it does this not on one front, but across three layers at once.
The nearest layer is the front line.
short-range firstperson view FPV drones used like sniper rifles out to 10 or 20 km hunting not just soldiers but tanks and armored vehicles.
The second layer is medium-range drones reaching hundreds of kilome cutting the land corridor from Russia down into Crimea and the bridges to the north.
The cunning of this layer is its target order.
air defense systems first, then electronic warfare and communications nodes, opening a bubble through which Ukraine can send strike drones deeper.
Still, the third layer is very long range strikes.
Russia’s oil and gas infrastructure, its defense manufacturing, all three levels run simultaneously, highly sophisticated, tightly coordinated, and built largely on Ukraine’s own technology.
The classic rule of war is that crowded, expensive fleets rule the sky.
Ukraine, without matching a single modern jet, seized that sky with a cheap, distributed drone force.
So, what makes these drones a gamecher? The answer isn’t exotic hardware.
It’s production and guidance.
Take one of those longest range strike drones.
It looks like a modest model aircraft.
ordinary wings, a single propeller, a slow cruise of around 130 km an hour.
Yet with a 50 kg warhead, it can reach beyond 1,100 km.
It’s cheap.
Ukraine can build these by the thousands and tens of thousands, assemble and launch them quickly in the field, and leave almost no signature where they lift off.
The real art is in the navigation.
The drone loads both satellite positioning and an AI based imagery system into its electronic brain, memorizing its route in advance to slip past Russian air defenses, flying not straight but in zigzags.
Starlink terminals handle control in the early stage, even if that link is cut, the drone’s automatic guidance takes over, seeing its memorized route electronically and diving onto the target.
That’s why it’s so resistant to jamming.
And this mastery isn’t confined to offense.
Ukraine has also built drones that hunt drones, and countries like the UK are now learning from it.
A nation fighting for its own survival is at the same time writing the world’s playbook on drone warfare.
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Now we turn to the real question.
How do these strikes turn an entire peninsula and even the war itself? Step back to the whole picture.
Putin used Crimea for three jobs.
A secure base to launch drones, rockets, and aircraft, a logistics depot for stockpiling supplies, and a command hub housing the Black Sea fleet historic headquarters.
Ukraine is slowly starving that peninsula.
Three bridges keep Crimea alive.
And all are under pressure.
The Kirch Bridge reaching to the Russian mainland in the east and the Chonhaar and Henichess crossings opening to occupied southern Ukraine in the north.
The feries carrying rail cars across the Sea of Azov have been halted.
Most air defense systems wiped out and resupply from the north choked off.
The result is so severe that no fuel is left for civilians on the peninsula.
every drop reserved for the state and the military.
And this siege isn’t only from the air, it’s squeezed from the sea as well.
Ukraine’s naval drones have brought the Black Sea increasingly under control.
The Russian Black Sea fleet that once ruled the region has been forced to pull its main base out of Sevastapole and withdraw east.
While air drones burn jets in their hangers, sea drones seal the peninsula’s maritime gate.
a vice closing from two sides at once, both without pilots, without crude ships.
Ukraine knows it can’t retake Crimea with a Normandy style landing, so it lays siege with drones instead.
So why Crimea so relentlessly? This air campaign isn’t severed from the ground war in the south.
The bases in Crimea were the nodes feeding air support to Russia’s southern groupings.
As the peninsula’s air power burns in its hangers, its corridor is cut and its resupply choked, the Russian offensive in the south loses the air umbrella above it, meaning a hanger collapsing at Saki thins the protection over a Russian unit’s head hundreds of kilometers away at the front.
Yet, there’s one more layer.
Crimea sits at the very center of Putin’s psyche.
By some accounts, he spent his honeymoon there, oligarchs vacation there, and owned properties along its coast.
Crimea was the playground of the wealthy from Moscow and St.
Petersburg.
To strike Crimea then is to strike Putin’s center of gravity, a psychological blow aimed at him personally.
On the other side of that coin, for Ukrainians, this is a matter of sovereignty and identity.
The idea of winning back a Ukraine without Crimea is the very will that keeps this country fighting.
So, does any of this change the course of the war? People tend to measure who’s winning by the front line, but that’s only a tactical reading.
On the ground, Ukraine has stopped Russian advances in most places.
The front has settled into a stalemate.
A military locked at the tactical level is left with two paths, the operational and the strategic.
The operational level is where the deep strikes happen.
Ukraine targets everything that feeds the Russian front.
logistics, the land corridor, fuel plants, ammunition dumps, defense manufacturing, and the railways that are the spine of Russian resupply.
And it grows more effective week by week.
The hangers at Saki and the refineries near Moscow are pieces of the same logic.
When you can’t break the enemy at the front, you collapse the arteries that keep him standing.
The strategic level is international relations.
Donald Trump, long reluctant to voice open support for Putin, has lately begun increasing his support for Ukraine, a strategic gain for Kiev.
Stack all three tracks together.
And the conclusion many analysts reach is this.
At the levels that actually decide a war, the initiative is shifting to Ukraine.
Even Putin himself has been forced to openly admit the strain that drone strikes have inflicted on fuel supplies across Russia.
And for a leader to make such an admission signals on its own which way the needle is turning.
History shows why this can work.
An army doesn’t have to be beaten at the front to collapse and withdraw.
In Vietnam, the United States won nearly every tactical battle, yet still had to abandon the country entirely.
The sustained attrition at the operational level and the political cost it created at home became unbearable.
In Afghanistan, the Taliban never won a single setpiece battle, but waged the war at the operational and strategic levels until the cost grew intolerable for NATO.
Ukraine’s logic is close to this.
Keep pressing the front while landing the real blow deep in the enemy’s rear.
Still, honesty is due.
This is not a collapse coming tomorrow.
Putin holds an immense pool of manpower.
In all likelihood, he’ll exhaust his economic and political support long before he runs out of people.
Meaning the real break may come not at the front, but inside Russia’s domestic political equation.
Ukraine keeps probing along a colossal 1,000 km front, roughly the distance from Abedine to London.
And as the Russians weaken, a breakthrough somewhere isn’t out of the question.
Yet, punching through and holding that ground is another matter entirely.
For now, Ukraine holds the initiative across all three levels at once.
And one truth must never be forgotten.
While Ukraine strikes military targets with surgical precision, Russia goes on hitting Ukrainian cities and civilians in the very same days.
The United Nations has reported a 40% surge in civilian casualties from Russian air attacks.
The bill for this war, now passed its fourth year, is paid most heavily of all by civilians on both sides.
In the end, Saki is a small photograph of this entire method.
Drones costing a few thousand turning 30 to $50 million jets to ash in their hangers.
An entire peninsula placed under siege without a single soldier setting foot on it.
The most expensive weapons left defenseless in their own bunkers.
The war’s center of gravity has shifted from the front line to the air bases, bridges, refineries, and railways that feed it.
Without a landing, Ukraine is lifting the weight of an entire war off the front and carrying it deep into Russia.
And every hanger burning at Saki delivers Putin the same message.
No shelter is deep enough anymore.
So, what’s your take? Will Ukraine’s war of depth force Putin to the table or drag this war out even longer? Share your thoughts in the comments.
Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
