Will Ukraine retake Crimea?

Mark O'Neill June 18, 2026 11:15

For Vladimir Putin, the most precious land he has seized from Ukraine since 2014 is the peninsula of Crimea. Captured in 1783 by Catherine the Great, it was the home of the Black Sea Fleet and the most desirable place in Russia for a holiday.

When Putin launched his full-scale war in February 2022, Crimea was already occupied. It has been a critical base for Russian land, sea and air operations. The consensus among foreign military specialists and diplomats was that Ukraine would never recapture it.

For the first time since the occupation in 2014, this has changed. “We will isolate Crimea in the near future,” the Commander of Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces told Reuters on June 11.

Robert Brovdi, known by his call sign “Madyar”, said that, because of intense drone attacks, Russian military cargo traffic along the R-280 highway that connects Crimea with the mainland had fallen by 71 per cent during the previous two weeks. “Within another month, we will have total control over the road,” he said.

Civilian drivers are said to refuse to take vehicles along this road because of the high risk of drone attack, death and injury. The Ukrainians call it “the road of death.”

On June 7 and 9, the Chonhar Bridge from Crimea to the mainland was destroyed by Ukrainian strikes.

“We will create conditions that will make it extremely difficult for any military personnel or those working in the defence industry to remain in Crimea, in the temporarily occupied territories or use the access routes to them,” Madyar said.

The Ukrainian Ministry of Defence has set a 2026 production target of seven million drones, or 580,000 a month, up from four million in 2025.

In May, operators successfully hit nearly 180,000 confirmed enemy targets and neutralized around 4,000 Russian Shahed-type drones, said Olexandr Syrskyi, head of Ukraine’s Armed Forces. Each month Russia is losing 30,000 soldiers killed or badly wounded.

For Madyar, this means placing drones 24 hours a day above roads like the R-280 highway, When they see vehicles carrying Russian soldiers, equipment and fuel, they attack them.
This year Ukrainian drones and missiles have also targeted military facilities across Crimea, including oil depots, air, land and naval bases.

Military analysts say that a land invasion would be too dangerous for Ukraine. It would result in heavy personnel losses and meet elaborate defence fortifications along the coast. It might not succeed.

Instead Madyar and his colleagues aim to blockade the Russian military there, cutting them off from supplies of food, fuel, arms and other equipment and forcing them to evacuate. This would avoid direct fighting by Ukrainian soldiers.

The blueprint is the Kinburn Spit, a piece of land 40 kilometres long and 10 kilometers wide in Mikolaiv oblast which juts into the Black Sea and is close to the Ukrainian mainland. It is west of Crimea. Russian soldiers occupied it in June 2022 and used it to launch kamikaze drones against Odesa, Ukraine’s most important port.

On June 8, the Institute for the Study of War in Washington reported that Russian forces were withdrawing from the Kinburn Spit because they could not be supplied any more. The Russian military has not confirmed this.

Crimea has a long and complicated history. It was occupied by the Mongols and the Ottoman Empire, before the armies of Catherine the Great seized it in 1783. During World War Two, the Nazi occupied it. In 1954, the Soviet government in Moscow transferred to Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union.

At Ukraine’s independence in 1991, it remained part of that country. In December that year, 90 per cent of people in all Ukraine voted for independence. In Crimea, the proportion voting in favour was 54 per cent, reflecting a significant minority of ethnic Russians there.

On February 27, 2014, Russian special forces without insignia invaded Crimea, overthrew the government and installed a pro-Russian one. On March 27 that year, 100 countries at the United Nations voted to call the invasion illegal. Only 11 voted against and 58 abstained. China abstained but has not recognised the occupation.

Putin conceived the 2022 invasion during Covid, when he was one of the most isolated leaders in the world. He does not have a mobile phone and uses Internet sparingly. He imposed stringent quarantine rules to see him.

He spent most of his time absorbed in books on Russian history, especially the reign of Catherine the Great from 1762 to 1796. During her reign, Russia greatly expanded its territory, including Alaska, Poland, Crimea and much of present-day Ukraine. She called much of this New Russia.

This is the basis of Putin’s belief that there is no such country as Ukraine and that it is part of Russia that must be recaptured. Despite more than four years of war and 1.38 million Russian dead and wounded, he has not changed his opinion.

Mark O'Neill

A Hong Kong-based writer, teacher and speaker.