The peninsula, which is deeply significant to the Russian leader, has declared a state of emergency as Ukraine tightens its airborne siege

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By Mark Galeotti

June 27, 2026

I was living in Moscow in March 2014 when Vladimir Putin held a rigged referendum as part of his annexation of Crimea. Russian forces had seized control of the peninsula a month earlier, and the ballot asked voters whether they wanted to rejoin Russia or be part of Ukraine, as it had been since 1954.

My flat was on one of the city’s ring roads, and on the night after the announcement that the vote had ratified reincorporation into Russia, I scarcely got a wink of sleep. Cheering Muscovites drove round and round their city, horns blaring, flags waving from car windows. This was not some Kremlin-organised performance; this was genuine and spontaneous public enthusiasm.

This is why the struggle over Crimea is so significant. In recent days, Ukraine’s drones and missiles have been hammering the roads, railways and bridges leading into the peninsula. On Friday, as Kyiv tightened its airborne siege, the regional governor Sergei Aksyonov declared a state of emergency.

Kyiv is using its increasingly effective forces — especially the so-called mid-range strike capabilities that sit between the expensive long-range drones hitting major cities and the cheap, short-range systems that scour the front line — to hit Russian bases and supply lines. In Crimea, that meant first attacking air defence radars and launchers, and then using the window of opportunity this opened to hit the routes connecting the peninsula to the rest of Russia, along with oil and gas storage facilities and power stations.

Mykhailo Fedorov, the Ukrainian defence minister, boasted earlier this month of “isolating Crimea with drones” and this certainly seems to be happening. Ferries have been attacked, roads closed and the railway bridge over the North Crimea Canal has been cratered. On Wednesday the capital, Sevastopol, was left without power when drones hit an electrical substation. All civilian sales of fuel have been suspended.

Even during the war, Crimea’s beaches and historic sites made it a popular tourist destination. Now bookings are evaporating, children’s summer camps are cancelled, and the queue of cars and trucks waiting to cross the Kerch bridge back to mainland Russia regularly stretches more than five miles. The peninsula’s economy is in crisis.

As with all such campaigns, civilians are inevitably suffering. There have been direct casualties from strikes, and local social media highlighted the plight of pensioners left without electricity in temperatures of 30C. The one pensioner whom Kyiv is really trying to affect, though, is the one in the Kremlin.

Crimea was part of Russia until 1954 when it was transferred to Kyiv’s control for administrative convenience, and is not like the other Ukrainian territories that Putin has claimed. It has strategic significance as the home of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet (and many Russian officers retired to the peninsula with their families), as well as spiritual significance. The town of Chersonesos is regarded as the symbolic birthplace of Russian Orthodoxy. It also has very clear political significance to Putin as the only truly popular element of his annexation campaigns.

Some more ambitious voices in Kyiv are calling for an early attempt to retake the peninsula by force, but the general consensus is that this would be very difficult. It is heavily garrisoned and extensive defences have been built along the narrow isthmus connecting it to the mainland. A German officer told me last week that “for Ukraine to try to liberate Crimea would require it to take too many forces from other fronts, weakening them seriously. It might fail there, and in the process also fail to hold the Russians back elsewhere.”

In reality, Kyiv’s hope is that, by presenting Putin with the threat of losing this most prized of conquests, he will be forced to the negotiating table and accept Ukraine’s demand for a ceasefire before anything else. But the risk is that it drives the Russian leader to escalate instead.

Although formally committed to regaining control over all occupied territories, the unspoken assumption within the Ukrainian government is that it will have to accept Russia’s de facto control of Crimea as part of the price of peace. Putin would thus have to negotiate in good faith and on Kyiv’s terms if he wants to end the siege and lift the threat to the peninsula — or if it simply becomes unsustainable for Moscow to garrison, supply and maintain it.

President Zelensky seems confident that this is a viable strategy and has separately approved a plan by the SBU, the Ukrainian Security Service, to launch what has been described as a 40-day operation to pressure Russia to sue for peace. Likewise, the bullish Fedorov, promising that “in the near future, Crimea will become an island”, is reportedly of the view that Moscow will be forced to come to terms within a few months.

There is certainly a new confidence in Kyiv, just as many in Russia are growing pessimistic. Igor Girkin, a nationalist officer now in prison for his critical views of the Kremlin, who has often offered a perceptive analysis of the campaign, wrote that the situation was “grave now, but promises to become critical in just a few weeks if the enemy continues its ‘strategic air offensive’.”

But the outcome may be rather less predictable and controllable than Zelensky seems to think. Within Russia’s administrative and business elites are pragmatists who feel that, with or without control of the last portions of the Donbas region that Putin has claimed, Russia should freeze the conflict. They argue that the war has reached a point of diminishing returns, and it is best simply to hold on to what has already been conquered, declare victory and open negotiations intended to stop the Ukrainian strikes into the Russian heartland and lift at least some western sanctions.

There is also a maximalist camp, though. They agree that the conflict cannot be allowed to drag on but their answer is escalation: the mobilisation of hundreds of thousands of reservists, the deployment of conscripts (who until now have largely not been sent to fight) and maybe more aggressive covert operations against the factories in Europe supplying Ukraine’s weapons. They accept that this would be massively unpopular at home, but argue that short-term disruption is a worthwhile price to pay for a quick seizure of the Donbas and the chance to impose their preferred peace terms on Kyiv.

This would be a high-risk strategy, as failure on the front could galvanise protest at home, the way defeats against Japan in 1905 and during the First World War did for the tsars. To the hawks, unwilling to believe that the Ukrainians could handle a full-scale offensive by hundreds of thousands of fresh troops, it is a good bet. Fortunately, Putin, who despite his macho public persona is generally quite risk averse, does not yet seem convinced.

However, when Putin is panicked, he tends to make decisions hastily and badly. Speaking to military cadets last week, he claimed that Kyiv was seeking to “destabilise society” and, by implication, his regime. If he fears that the loss of Crimea, or simply an inability to protect it, will not simply tarnish his legacy but possibly bring him down, he may opt to negotiate — but he could as easily be tempted to up the ante.

Fedorov warned that his drone campaign “could lead to some unexpected consequences for Russia”, but this applies to Ukraine, too.

https://www.thetimes.com/world/russia-ukraine-war/article/putin-losing-crimea-russia-state-of-emergency-ukraine-68c9pj7lv