Transcription
The situation around Crimea right now is absolutely mind-blowing. And in my opinion, Crimea is quickly becoming once again one of the most interesting theaters of the entire war in Ukraine.
About a year ago, I started making videos about Crimea, talking about how Ukraine was systematically putting the peninsula under siege and that in fact Ukraine was executing a strategy that would eventually, not immediately, but eventually over time allow Ukraine to potentially take Crimea back from Russia. At the time I posted that, the Russians absolutely mocked me. They actually made several response videos to my video, which is pretty rare even for me. And they told me that the things I was saying were impossible and that they would never actually happen. So you can imagine my satisfaction when over the past couple of months, the things I talked about a year ago are not only starting to happen, but many of them have actually already been completed. And today we reached a big milestone where in many ways Crimea has been totally cut off.
But this didn't just start today. What I want to talk about today is a systematic campaign that Ukraine has been executing against Crimea for the past several months. A ramp up of the action that I was already talking about over a year ago. And this systematic action involves a couple of different things. First, it involves the air defense systems around Crimea. And second, it involves the supply routes going into Crimea. And thirdly, it involves the actual storage facilities in Crimea that allowed them in the past to sustain disruptions in their supply routes. Right now, Crimea has reached a point where all of these different systems are offline all at the same time, and it is putting the peninsula in the weakest position it has been in, in my opinion, for this entire war.
Now, if you follow the channel regularly, you can obviously see that I touch on a lot of hot button issues. And naturally, people are constantly disagreeing with me. Because of that, I find it incredibly important to base my analysis on a factual foundation, not just for my own integrity, but also for my own sanity. I have a tool that I use that helps me prepare for this, and that tool is Ground News, a longtime sponsor of this channel. What Ground News does is they bring together articles from across the political spectrum for any given topic all in one place. But they do a whole lot more than that, too. For each given article or source of an article, they identify whether that source has a political bias, how factual they're known to be, and also who funds the source, which can sometimes tell you the reason for a potential bias. One thing I really like in Ground News is the bias summary at the top of every subject, which basically reads the articles for you and identifies the competing narratives, if there are any, before you even dive in. This is super helpful because it actually reads a lot more articles than you can and identifies things that you might miss on your own. Before I record a video, I always try to cross-reference on Ground News to make sure I'm being fair to every side, even if I disagree with them. And I personally think the world would be a much better place if more people took that approach. If you want to check out Ground News for yourself, because they're a sponsor of the channel, you can actually get a 40% discount on their Vantage plan by subscribing using my link or the QR code on screen. And that Vantage plan is the same plan that I use to get access to all of their best features. So, go check it out. And now, back to the video.
So, to fully appreciate the significance of what's happening in Crimea right now, it helps to just briefly recap Crimea's geography. Crimea, of course, is a peninsula jutting off the southern portion of Ukraine. But I have long said that for all intents and purposes, Crimea may as well be an island. Because as far as road and rail connections to the outside world, there are only a couple of road and rail connections in the north across an incredibly narrow land connection or a road and rail connection in the east. And that is it. That is all that Crimea has, at least as far as land connections to connect it to the outside world and to allow resources to come in or to allow people to go out.
For a long time, people have looked at this dynamic and they have said it would be impossible for Ukraine to ever take Crimea back from Russia, particularly under combat circumstances because the nature of the geography means that to do that, Ukraine would have to send troops across a very narrow choke point where they would be eliminated very easily or they would have to conduct an amphibious landing which would also be very, very difficult. Both of these are high casualty events. Casualty events that Ukraine just frankly probably could not sustain. And so again, people have said Ukraine will never take Crimea back from Russia. But these same people typically missed the fact that this geographic reality can work in both directions. And these narrow choke points that can prevent supplies or people from coming in, those don't only prevent Ukrainian soldiers from coming in if the Russian military is opposing them, but they also prevent Russian supplies from coming in if the Ukrainian military is opposing those supplies. That's the dynamic we're looking at today, where Ukraine is taking advantage of Crimea's geography to very effectively put the entire peninsula under siege by attacking the limited roads that go into the peninsula. And today, very recently, they have just effectively cut off the last of those supply routes.
Now, have they been completely cut off? No, that's not what I'm claiming. But they have been pressured to the point that Russia can no longer confidently and consistently get supplies onto the Crimean Peninsula. Which means that if Ukraine chose to, they could maintain this pressure to the extent that the military presence on Crimea is going to begin decreasing over time. This is a huge pivot point and we've been talking about it for quite a while. We're now potentially here.
So, what's changed recently, especially over just the past couple of weeks, is that Ukraine has really been ramping up their mid-range drone strikes against Russia, where they are attaching Starlink terminals to relatively inexpensive drones, flying them past the electronic warfare wall that exists around the front lines, and communicating with Starlink to allow them to hit Russia's rear, hitting targets within a range of approximately 100 to 300 km away from the front line. Something that they've always had tools where they could do it, but they haven't had the inexpensive tools like inexpensive drones to be able to do it at scale on a regular and a consistent basis. And this change is massive just in general. What it means is that essentially all of Russian-occupied Ukraine is now a target and Russian soldiers who traditionally felt like they were safe in rear areas are now essentially all on the front lines. But even more specifically, it gives Ukraine access to cut off Russian logistics like they never have before. And one thing we're seeing on a very regular basis on a daily basis now is Ukraine striking trucks and trains in Russian-occupied Ukraine preventing supplies from getting just about anywhere. And one area of particular focus here is Crimea. Because what this newfound capability means, what this newfound range means is that Ukraine now has the capability to completely cut off the last leg of the transportation stool that allowed Russia to consistently get supplies to Crimea. Because now every truck and every train going into Crimea can be destroyed not by an expensive missile, but rather by a relatively inexpensive Ukrainian drone. And this gives Ukraine the opportunity to dramatically change the dynamic on Crimea at a time of their choosing. And it seems like they have been preparing to do exactly that.
To really express the magnitude of the current situation, we have already seen Ukraine conducting similar strikes on the supply routes feeding Russia's front lines. They've been doing that for well over a year now, and the result of that has been obvious. Ukraine has been so effective that they have effectively stalled Russia's advances because Russia just cannot get large enough groups of men or equipment or material or explosives or weapons, anything to the front line to actually coordinate assaults. That is how effective Ukraine has been across basically the entire front line. And now what we're seeing is Ukraine can create that same dynamic for the entire peninsula of Crimea. And if that sounds like a long shot, it would actually be easier for Ukraine to take the leap and do that than it has been for Ukraine to stop supplies from reaching the entire Russian front because the entire Russian front is a huge amount of different supply routes. Crimea again is just a couple of roads. The main thing that has stopped this from happening has been again that electronic warfare wall and the fact that Ukrainian fiber optic drones that can get past that warfare wall that, sorry, that electronic warfare wall only have a limited range. Now that Ukraine has overcome that hurdle, they can do exactly what they've been doing for years and have proven that they can do for years to the entire peninsula of Crimea by putting the same pressure on just the couple of roads that go through Crimea's northern entrance. This is a big deal. It means that Ukraine can effectively cut off Crimea from supplies at a moment of their choosing. And I have seen a lot of signals that make me believe Ukraine may be planning to do just that because this current development does not exist in a vacuum. It's actually just the latest in a series of things that have been happening on Crimea.
The first has been again, Ukraine has been ramping up their strikes on Crimea's air defenses. They've taken out something like over a hundred different air defense systems on Crimea since the start of 2026. And that's been huge. Ukraine does this from time to time. They clear out Russian air defense systems. Russia replaces them. Ukraine goes and just destroys them again. But Russia feels like they have to protect Crimea. So they replace the air defense systems. This lets Ukraine grind down Russia over time. Because Russia is clearly terrified as Ukraine destroys the Crimean air defense systems that they're creating gaps that they could actually exploit to make life hard for the soldiers or the civilians living there. And that would of course be a crisis for Russia.
Lately, however, the situation on Crimea has been a lot more than just the regular Ukrainian strikes on Russian air defense systems because Ukraine has been pursuing some targets that they have never fully pursued before. Certainly not all at the same time. And this happened around the beginning of April, setting the stage for what we're seeing today, where at the beginning of April, Ukraine struck the largest oil terminal in Crimea, destroying, I believe it was 23 out of 29 of the storage tanks at the facility. This was a big deal because this terminal and these storage tanks were what made Crimea somewhat durable against a siege. They allowed Crimea to buy some time, if the transport routes were cut off, to still supply oil to the rest of the peninsula. That was a big deal. It meant Russia could sustain and it meant that they did not have to continue supply routes when the pressure was immense. But Russia no longer has that luxury. Crimea is now in a state where if Ukraine does put sustained pressure on the supply routes, they're going to run out of oil. Really, really, really fast.
So it does seem like some intentional planning for Ukraine's part, especially when you look at the other thing that Ukraine recently did, which was again at the beginning of April, to strike the final ferry that is servicing Crimea from mainland Russia. So I have to explain this ferry situation a little bit. On the eastern side of Crimea, there is a bridge, the Kerch Strait Bridge. The only bridge that connects Crimea to mainland Russia and a major supply artery for the entire peninsula. Early in the war, Ukraine actually struck this bridge. And they struck it so badly that it compromised the structural integrity of the bridge to the point that Russia did not feel safe sending military equipment across the bridge, especially heavy military equipment like air defense systems, tanks, armored vehicles. They'll still send civilians across, but not military equipment. In order to continue supplying the Crimean Peninsula, Russia then started relying on their ferries. And they had a fleet of three ferries. And very early on, Ukraine struck all three of those ferries as well. One of them was completely destroyed. Two of them were disabled. That was in 2024. Russia has been working to repair these ferries since 2024. And they recently came back in commission in March, April of 2026. And as soon as they came back in commission, Ukraine struck the ferries again. They hit one of them in March and they hit one of them again at the beginning of April, the final one. And it really looked like Ukraine was just waiting for Russia to finish repairing the ferries and then to take them offline. So, you know, it took them two years to repair them the last time. It'll probably take them even longer now because attrition on Russia, skilled workers, materials, that's all gotten so much worse. So, Ukraine has effectively bought themselves some time where Russia can no longer use the ferries to supply Crimea at the same time where they're now putting pressure on the northern supply route that comes into Crimea, which is now putting Russia in a situation where they are forced to rely on the Kerch Strait Bridge again. The bridge that they already decided earlier on was not a safe bridge for them to send military equipment across. And in all of this context, we see that Ukraine also did something else around the Kerch Strait Bridge, which was at the end of April, they targeted some ships that were responsible for protecting the Kerch Strait Bridge from sabotage attacks. So it really looks like in the eastern portion of Crimea, Ukraine is setting the stage to stop all supplies into Crimea from that route.
What we're seeing then right now is a setup of conditions that could allow for a full siege of Crimea for the very first time. And this is something that could allow Ukraine to take Crimea back without all of the massive casualties that everybody was predicting just a year ago. Just think about it critically for a couple of seconds. Ukraine has already demonstrated that they can hit Russian military equipment on Crimea. They have taken out the air defense systems there. I don't even know how many times. It's been over and over and over again. They've also taken out the Russian military headquarters buildings there. They've taken out factories that are located there. They've taken out oil facilities that are located there. They've taken out military aircraft located on Crimea. And they've also taken out the Russian Navy stationed around Crimea and forced them to flee to other bases. Ukraine can definitely put sustained pressure on Crimea. The only thing preventing that from accumulating is Russian supplies continuing to come in to replenish those losses. So if Crimea is fully cut off, Ukraine could definitely wear down the peninsula over time.
And then when we combine this logic with the new developments that Ukraine has made over the past year when it comes to ground robotics, things get really interesting because Ukraine has demonstrated now that they can use robots, not humans, to capture Russian infantry positions without any human casualties. So this also changes the nature of a potential invasion of Crimea. Over time, what Ukraine has to do is just grind down the defenses. Once those defenses are sufficiently ground down, use pressure from traditional drone teams, traditional ground robotics to ultimately take those positions back. It doesn't have to happen overnight. That's the nature of a siege. It just has to have consistent pressure, consistent progress until the victory is attained. And they could definitely do it.
So, the question I'm definitely going to get is if this is possible, why didn't Ukraine do this years ago? And I think that goes to something that I've already said in this video, which is the fact that Russia kept replenishing their losses. And for Ukraine, that was not necessarily a bad thing at all. For Ukraine, Crimea has been this easy, soft target where they can hit stuff with abandon and destroy very high-value Russian military targets. Russian military targets that typically for most of the war have been out of reach on Russian territory itself, especially considering the fact that Ukraine didn't have Western weapons that they could use to strike Russian territory proper. They didn't have the permission to do that for most of the war. Now Ukraine has their own homegrown weapons and they can do it. But the point is Crimea has been a great source of attrition. Not just wearing down the resources on Crimea itself, but also wearing down the resources for Russia as a whole because every air defense system that has to replace a broken one on Crimea is one that you can't station around Moscow or around a factory in Siberia. You get the picture. It seems though that there is a potential shift in Ukrainian logic now. It seems that they have potentially decided they have done enough attrition to the Russian military and they can start now setting up the next phase of the strategy, which isn't just grinding down the Russian equipment, but it's actually making some steps to start pushing forward. The war has definitely reached a new stage.
Now, we've covered a lot in today's video, but inevitably there will be some questions that you guys, my audience, have about things that just did not make it into the outline while I was filming. So, to add some additional depth to these videos, I've decided to start doing a weekly insider Q&A where I will respond to the top questions from you guys, my audience, on the topics from the videos I posted that week. So, definitely leave a comment below with your question if there's something you want me to dive deeper on. And to get access to that Q&A, just click the join button below this video next to my picture on screen. I will look to post that Q&A on Friday. And I look forward to these sessions where we can go a little bit deeper together. Thanks so much for watching, guys.