Ukraine has sharply escalated its campaign to sever Russia's supply lines to occupied Crimea, striking dozens of oil tankers in the Sea of Azov and targeting fuel depots and refineries deep inside Russian territory. The commander of Ukraine's drone forces, Robert Brovdi, said at least 25 ships had been hit and set on fire over four days between 6 and 9 July, with 12 tankers alone struck in a single overnight operation. Ukraine's Defence Ministry put the total at 36 vessels — including 32 tankers from Russia's so-called shadow fleet, commercial ships used to transport oil in circumvention of international sanctions — hit across both the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea. The Sea of Azov is an inland sea connected to the Black Sea via the Kerch Strait, and the port of Kerch on the Crimean peninsula serves as a key onshore fuel-loading facility for the region.

The strikes are part of what Ukraine has publicly described as a 'logistics lockdown' — a coordinated effort to choke off both land and sea supply routes into and out of Crimea, the peninsula Russia annexed in 2014. Satellite imagery analysed by open-source investigators shows the number of tankers near Kerch dropping after previous attacks, and a large plume of smoke rising from a vessel roughly four kilometres off the Crimean coast. Named tankers among those hit include the Venera-3, Sanar-1, Klimena, Thetis, and Penelopa, as well as a passenger ferry and a bulk carrier at Kerch port. A naval drone also struck a sanctioned tanker called Blue near Yalta, a resort city on Crimea's Black Sea coast. Russian pro-war Telegram channels noted that tankers had effectively become a 'shooting gallery', and acknowledged that the Black Sea Fleet had retreated to the port of Novorossiysk on the Russian mainland.

Parallel drone strikes have hit energy infrastructure well beyond the front lines. Fires broke out at the Ilsky refinery in the Krasnodar region — a facility with a capacity of 138,000 barrels per day that has been targeted repeatedly — as well as at refineries in Saratov and Nizhnekamsk in Tatarstan. Oil depots in the Tver and Stavropol regions also caught fire, and a military airfield in the Voronezh region, south of Moscow, reported a blaze. Russian authorities said Ukrainian drones also struck port infrastructure in Taganrog on the Sea of Azov, prompting evacuations of nearby residents. Moscow's defence ministry reported intercepting 376 to 415 Ukrainian drones in individual overnight waves, though such figures cannot be independently verified. Meanwhile, Russia continued strikes on Ukrainian cities: ballistic missile attacks on Kyiv killed at least three people and wounded ten, while a strike on Odessa, a major Black Sea port city in southern Ukraine, killed four and damaged harbour infrastructure.

The scale of Ukraine's campaign is compounding fuel shortages that already affect more than 90% of Russian regions, with queues reported at petrol stations in Moscow and St Petersburg. Russia has responded by banning diesel exports. President Vladimir Putin had pledged in late June to secure Crimea's monthly fuel needs — estimated at 70,000 tonnes — through increased land and sea deliveries, but those sea routes are now under sustained attack. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has framed the strategy as a legitimate response to Russian strikes on Ukrainian cities, arguing that Russians must 'feel that it is their state that is waging war.'

The intensifying strikes have sharpened a diplomatic debate over whether military pressure can bring the war closer to an end. At the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, US President Donald Trump acknowledged the drone campaign was 'an escalation, but also an escalation that can help lead to an end,' while Secretary of State Marco Rubio argued Russia was struggling to defend its own airspace, creating more room for negotiations. The Kremlin flatly rejected this logic: spokesman Dmitry Peskov accused the White House of a fundamental misreading of the conflict, warning that continued escalation would only extend the war and force Russia to establish a larger security buffer zone. Three sources close to the Kremlin told Reuters that the drone strikes have hardened Putin's resolve to keep fighting, with two suggesting he was likely to intensify military operations in the coming months. On a separate diplomatic track, Zelensky announced that Ukraine and the United States had reached a political-level agreement on licensing Ukraine to produce Patriot air defence interceptors domestically — a step Kyiv has sought urgently given the threat posed by Russian ballistic missiles.