Ukrainian drone strikes overnight damaged several bridges linking the Kherson Region with Crimea, reported The Moscow Times, citing Kherson Governor Vladimir Saldo. Hit were bridges over the North Crimean Canal near Preobrazhenka and Myrno, a road bridge on the Perekop-Armyansk route, and a bridge near Stavky—the alternative corridors into the peninsula after earlier strikes this week closed the Chongar bridge on the Rostov-Simferopol highway. Rail service in parts of Crimea was also suspended after a June 8 drone strike on the Moscow-Simferopol train killed a crew member.
The bridge attacks cap a month-long campaign against Crimea’s land lifelines, waged with a new generation of mid-range, AI-guided drones—among them the Hornet, built by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s company Swift Beat, reports the Financial Times. So many fuel tankers have burned on the east-west M-14 highway across southern Zaporozhye and Kherson Regions, that drivers refuse the route. Sevastopol Governor Mikhail Razvozhaev announced gasoline rationing May 22, and rationing has now extended across Crimea as the tourist season opens. At the other access point to Crimea, via the Kerch Strait at the eastern tip of the peninsula, hazardous cargo remains banned from the Crimean Bridge, and loaded tankers queue at Taman for ferries. Dmytro Pletenchuk, a spokesman for the Ukrainian Naval Forces (an almost entirely drone fleet), said June 1 that the aim is to force Russia to “have no choice but to start transporting hazardous cargo across the bridge.” More broadly, Kiev and its sponsors are trying to draw Russian forces away from the Donbass, where Russia is making substantial advances.
The campaign to disrupt Russian logistics in its southern new territories has been accompanied by manic British headlines such as “Ukraine is turning the tables” in the above-cited Financial Times article, and “Ukraine turns the tide” by Jack Watling of the Royal United Services Institute in the New York CFR’s Foreign Affairs. Kit Klarenberg of The Grayzone has documented how British military and intelligence operatives guided naval operations against Russia under “Project Alchemy,” from the beginning of the conflict and including the disastrous Krynky operation (Oct. 2023-July 2024) in which more than 1,000 Ukrainian soldiers died trying to hold a bridgehead on the south bank of the Dnieper River in Kherson Region. In the current escalatory drive, the British-tutored Ukrainians appear to be trying to re-enact parts of the 1853-56 Crimean War, by maneuvers like an attempt to land forces on the Kinburn Spit at the mouth of the Dnieper. Yesterday a Ukrainian drone struck the memorial museum of the Crimean War in Sevastopol, which housed the huge panoramic painting The Siege of Sevastopol by Franz Roubaud.
