More than 12 years since President Putin’s “little green men” arrived and more than four since Russia’s full-scale invasion, the battle for Crimea is finally under way
Jack Clover
July 24, 2026
The Times
Cartoons, songs and trees — this is what Viktoriya Polfuntikova recalls when she thinks of her childhood in the Crimean Peninsula when it was controlled by Ukraine. “It was peaceful, cosy and green, very green,” she says in a park in Kyiv, with a vast yellow and blue flag blowing in the wind behind her.
Now 23, she was 11 when Russia annexed the territory and began to cut down the trees in her native Bakhchysarai, replacing them with concrete. “They would build something only to take something else in return,” she says. “They built roads, then they’d take away the internet.”
More than 12 years since President Putin’s “little green men” arrived, and more than four since Russia’s full-scale invasion, the battle for Crimea is finally under way — a struggle that could be decisive for the outcome of the war. Since late spring a revolution in Ukrainian middle and long-range drone capabilities has allowed its forces to effectively cut off the peninsula from Russia.
There has been a severe fuel shortage in Crimea for weeks. Residents are experiencing long periods without electricity and water. Footage of queues and arguments at petrol stations, high prices and empty shelves in supermarkets have added to a sense that Ukraine’s strategy is working.
As part of an operation called Crimea Switch-off, Ukraine’s drone forces have already struck 117 energy sites on the peninsula and in other occupied regions this month, according to their commander, Robert Brovdi.
A video of a warehouse used by Wildberries, Russia’s equivalent of Amazon, burning in the Crimean city of Simferopol was shared on local Telegram channels on Friday. Videos of Russians who moved to the peninsula after the annexation setting off home in tears have been widely shared in Ukraine.
With ferries and the roads to the north of Crimea threatened by drones, the 12-mile Kerch Bridge, opened by President Putin in 2018, is the only way out. However, travel on the bridge is limited and many believe it is a matter of time before it is also hit.
One resident of northern Crimea said the area had no dairy products or fresh food in the shops and had spent two weeks without electricity. “The town resembles a huge beehive, generators of various sizes are constantly buzzing,” the resident told The Times. “The drone strikes affect both people who are waiting for de-occupation and have been supporting Ukraine all these years, and those who [support Russia].”
Speaking of the drone attacks, the resident added: “At first you hear a sound not dissimilar from a moped, then you hear the sound of shots as mobile groups of armed men try to shoot it down.”
Even as a young girl, Polfuntikova recalls how the atmosphere on the peninsula shifted overnight after the annexation. There was more “patriotic education” in her school and people were afraid to speak freely.
In secondary school, a person close to her told her about the Maidan revolution of 2014 — when Viktor Yanukovych, an ally of Putin, was deposed as Ukraine’s president — and taught her not to believe everything she heard. But it seemed to her that everyone around her wanted to join Russia. Only at university in Simferopol did she realise this was not the case, when she found a community online of like-minded young people with pro-Ukrainian views. When the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began and her lecturers said the massacres in Bucha were a “theatre show”, she knew she wanted to leave.
In October last year, after many arguments with pro-Russian family members, she took the extraordinary step of moving to Kyiv. She travelled thousands of miles on the bus, first to Minsk and back to organise her papers at the Ukrainian consulate there, then all the way via Moscow and Belarus to Kyiv. Now she works for a radio station and posts about her life on TikTok, where many young people in Crimea have contacted her about moving to Ukrainian-controlled territory.
It was the small things that surprised Polfuntikova the most: in government-controlled Ukraine, there is no need to carry a passport on the train. Social media sites are not blocked, one can order foreign clothes or even go to Europe on holiday, and people talk freely about politics on the street.
Relatives at home have told her about the electricity blackouts and fuel and water shortages. “For the first time Crimea is facing what Kyiv and other parts of Ukraine-controlled territory has faced for years and [the authorities] weren’t ready for it,” she says. Many residents do not even see the cause and effect of Putin’s war leading to this situation, she says, and fewer still see it as an effect of the annexation.
Crimeans are still treated with suspicion by Russian authorities and the military, Polfuntikova says.
One Russian deserter who served in an air defence unit in northern Crimea in 2023 recalls the “aggressiveness” towards civilians in nearby towns and villages. “Civilians were afraid to walk past our post,” he says. “I saw more than once how soldiers took money or water off them or beat them. Once I saw a soldier shoot a civilian in the leg just because they thought it was funny.”
Vadym Sukharevsky is known in Ukraine as the young officer who gave the first order to open fire on Russian-backed separatists in the Donbas war in April 2014, weeks after Crimea had been annexed in a sham referendum.
In many ways the strikes on Crimea are in keeping with Ukraine’s strategy to wage an effective campaign of asymmetric warfare against Russia, says Sukharevsky, who was the commander of the drone forces until last year. While Crimea is a major hub in terms of resupplying Russian forces in the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions, isolating it is imperative for other reasons too.
“Firstly Crimea is Ukraine and we need to get it back,” Sukharevsky says. “The strikes therefore serve a social purpose. Under no circumstances should either the Russians or those Ukrainians who have been assimilated there for over a decade forget that we have claims to Crimea, and are not giving up on them. Crimea should be ours.”
Documenting Russia’s occupation of the territory is a challenge. This is especially true of the lives of Crimean Tatars, the ethnic group that has called the peninsula home since the medieval period. Of more than 300 political prisoners from Crimea, more than half are from the Tatar minority. “This is just the tip of the iceberg,” says Tamila Tasheva, a Crimean Tatar MP who used to be responsible for Crimean affairs in President Zelensky’s office.
Stalin expelled the Tatars from Crimea to central Asia in the 1940s. Those who survived were allowed to return by the Ukrainian government in the 1990s, and many have therefore long held pro-Kyiv views. “They are used to surviving,” Tasheva says, adding that they see the current hardships as necessary if Russia is eventually to be pushed out of the peninsula.
In the short term, however, the main focus of the operation to isolate Crimea is to put pressure on Russia to return to the negotiating table and influence people so they look at Russia differently, Tasheva says. If one day Ukraine were to regain Crimea, perhaps in decades to come, it would not be “by military means alone”, she adds.
Ukraine is attempting to study the reunification of Germany and reconciliation after the wars in the Balkans to inform their planning for reintegrating the peninsula, if the time ever comes.
There are millions of Ukrainians who hope for that future. Many still have family in Crimea. One woman in her forties, who is originally from Simferopol, said: “When I ask my father why he doesn’t leave, he always replies, ‘Who would be here to welcome you home?’ He grows grapes and makes wine though not a drinker himself. There is a whole cellar-full waiting for me.”
For Polfuntikova, who has built a network of friends in Kyiv who have also escaped occupied territory, the most emotional moment was stepping onto the bus. “It was just a little sad. I was leaving entirely on my own. With no one to meet me on the other end,” she says. “I know now that I cannot go home. They will simply arrest me.”
Jack Glover works on news and investigations across different desks of The Sunday Times. Since joining the paper in 2022 he has reported on everything from dessert parlours to tree poisonings. Before training as a journalist Jack spent two years working as a theatre director in different cities across Ukraine from 2017-19 and nine months pulling pints at one of London’s finest riverside pubs.