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Can Dominance in the Lower Sky Change the Situation on the Ground?

Ukraine’s drone-driven campaign against bridges, transport, and supply routes is shifting the war’s center of gravity from ground offensives to logistical paralysis, with Crimea and the southern occupied territories as the decisive test.

Земля — воздух — земля: украинское наступление на логистику оккупированных территорий вступает в новый этап

Re: Russia · 2 July 2026 · read the original in Russian →

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According to Ukraine’s General Staff, Russian manpower losses in June were the highest since March 2025. Yet unlike the period from late 2024 to early 2025, the present level of losses is not being converted into kilometers of enemy territory brought under control. In June, Russia lost 465 people to capture one square kilometer; for May-June, the figure is more than 700 people.

Although the counting of captured and liberated territories is becoming increasingly provisional, the dynamic has changed in recent months in that the number of Ukrainian counterattacks resulting in territorial gains is growing. The Ukrainian command is maintaining uncertainty about the geolocation of such areas, perhaps with the intention of expanding its successes in the probed zones of vulnerability in Russia’s defenses.

The main trend, however, as Re: Russia suggested a month and a half ago, is the shift in the focus of military dynamics from ground offensives to aerial ones. Over the past month and a half, Ukraine has successfully implemented a strategy for blockading Crimea, which has disrupted the tourist season and sharply worsened the situation on the peninsula.

The chief question for the next month will be whether the Armed Forces of Ukraine can cause the logistics collapse to spread to the other occupied territories of Ukraine. In the past month, the most important elements of this strategy have been the destruction of a vast fleet of Russian motor vehicles and a sustained attack on the system of bridges and isthmuses connecting Crimea to the mainland.

At the same time, an additional consequence of the blockade of Crimea and the destruction of the transport links between it and Kherson region will be the de facto blockade of supply routes to the territories Russia has seized in Kherson region and to the Russian troop grouping stationed there. Although there is not much information about the situation in the occupied part of the region, some of it points to a mounting energy crisis comparable to Crimea’s.

In late June, Volodymyr Zelensky announced the start of a 40-day SBU operation to force Russia to end the war, without clearly explaining what exactly he meant. The next month and a half should answer the key question of military strategy at the present stage in the development of drone warfare: can dominance in the lower sky, aimed at paralyzing the enemy’s logistics and supply channels, be transformed into a change in the situation and in zones of control on the ground?

According to calculations by the Russian Casualties project based on data from the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the Russian army lost 39,290 people in June, the highest figure since March 2025 and 25 percent above the average monthly losses of the preceding five months, which stood at 31,300 people. Some military analysts link the rise in losses to a change in infiltration tactics: Russian assault troops seep through in ultra-small groups of one or two men in order to be less visible, but in such a configuration the chances of evacuating the wounded are close to zero. Another possible explanation is the expansion of the kill zone and the intensification of strikes on rear infrastructure: the probability of death increases even at a distance from the line of contact. “There is no rear anymore,” the Russian Z-channel Rybar wrote.

The situation with losses looks all the more monstrous because the pace of the Russian advance has fallen over the past two months to a minimum. According to calculations by deepstat.xyz, based on maps from the DeepState OSINT project linked to the Armed Forces of Ukraine, only about 85 square kilometers of Ukrainian territory came under firm Russian control in June, and 15 in May. This means that in June more than 460 casualties corresponded to every square kilometer captured, and 730 for May-June taken together. During the period of the highest Russian losses in the entire war, from September 2024 to March 2025, when losses averaged 43,000 people per month, the Russian army captured about 2,700 square kilometers, or roughly 115 casualties per kilometer. Thus, at the present stage of the war, the growing intensity of the army’s offensive efforts and the corresponding rise in losses, both of manpower and military equipment, have almost ceased to translate into territorial gains.

The question of the dynamics of territorial gains and losses, however, remains the subject of sharp debate. According to the Institute for the Study of War, 30 square kilometers came under firm Russian control in June, while another 30 kilometers constitute a zone of Russian infiltration. The Russian command presented openly false information about having taken control of 636 square kilometers in June, while accusing the Ukrainian side of manipulating the concept of the “gray zone.” Russian generals are amply crediting it to their own zone of control on the basis of “advance-credit” flag-plantings.

Yet territorial calculations are indeed becoming ever more provisional as the kill zone expands, infiltration tactics spread, and sectors of unstable control proliferate. Under these conditions, Ukraine’s territorial losses may turn out to be somewhat larger if one is speaking of territories over which Ukraine has lost stable control, that is, territories that have moved into the “gray zone”; but these losses will not be equal to gains by the Russian side, since it has not acquired stable control over them. Ukrainian sources, including DeepState, Mashovets, and others, acknowledge Russian successes in the second half of June on the Kostiantynivka-Huliaipole sector, but firmly refute Russian claims of almost complete control over Kostiantynivka. These refutations are also supported by the geolocations of photographs taken by Russian soldiers in the city, which were analyzed by Agentstvo.

In the debate over June’s territorial losses and gains, the theme of a “blind spot” is also emerging, and it may prove significant in the coming months. This concerns ungeolocated zones of counteroffensive action by the Armed Forces of Ukraine. In late June, AFU Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi said that the Ukrainian side had managed to go over to active operations and, since the beginning of the year, had liberated 670 square kilometers of territory, without specifying exactly in which areas. In March, he had claimed that 470 square kilometers had been liberated in the zone of Ukraine’s southern grouping of forces. Shortly after that interview, DeepState, a resource close to the Ukrainian command, made the reservation that “almost nothing of the AFU’s successes can yet be shown, but if one takes into account how much ours took back last month, the enemy will end up with a negative number for the second time in a row.”

The French OSINT analyst Clément Molin, citing his own sources, argues that as a result of AFU actions Ukraine regained roughly 40 square kilometers that had been under Russian control for more than a year, while another roughly 40 square kilometers of occupied territory ended up in the “gray zone.” Agentstvo, citing an expert from the Conflict Intelligence Team, suggests that the unnamed counteroffensive sector is most likely on the western border of Donetsk region, northwest of Velyka Novosilka. The Ukrainian military expert Oleksandr Kovalenko notes that “throughout June, Ukraine’s Defense Forces shared information about their counterattacks only to an extremely limited extent,” and says Russian troops “were forced to abandon a whole series of positions, especially in the Southern operational zone,” that is, in Kherson region.

All these reports may indirectly indicate a thinning of the Russian front line in certain sectors, something the Ukrainian side has not yet been fully able to exploit. At the same time, the Russian Defense Ministry-linked Telegram channel Rybar and the pro-Kremlin military expert Alexei Leonkov call such reports “plants” by the Ukrainian command. DeepState analysts, in the already cited message, advise readers to “be patient”: “We expect that in July, on one of the axes, they will begin reporting successes.”

Overall, one may argue that as the lower sky continues to be saturated with drones on both sides, the significance of the very notion of a “front line,” or “line of contact,” as well as the importance of the ground-offensive factor, is substantially declining. In early June, in a similar review of the month’s military results, we already noted that ground offensives are becoming extremely costly in terms of losses of manpower and equipment and will stagnate in the future, while the main focus of the military campaign is moving into the sky and the new operational doctrine of the Ukrainian counteroffensive is connected above all with the theater of middlestrikes (see Re: Russia: Offensive Lockdown). A month earlier still, we predicted that the land corridor to Crimea would soon become the hottest frontline zone of the Russian-Ukrainian war (see Re: Russia: Corridor of Opportunity).

Indeed, over the past month and a half the AFU has managed to achieve a partial blockage of the Novorossiya highway. Freight turnover on the R-280 route from Mariupol to Crimea fell by 70 percent, The Economist reported. The result has been a partial lockdown of the peninsula, leading to the complete disruption of the holiday season, partial paralysis of public and private transport, and instability in electricity supply. As we suggested, the powerful buildup of middlestrike capabilities has meant that the question of controlling territory has ceased to be exclusively a question of controlling it on the ground. At least until the Russian side finds ways to restore parity in the lower sky.

Until that happens, the main trend and the chief intrigue of the next two months will be the prospect of the logistics crisis spreading from Crimea to the Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine as a whole. In this respect, the important and somewhat underestimated trends of June were bridges and trucks: the mass losses of Russian freight vehicles, and Ukrainian strikes on bridges in the occupied territories.

Against the backdrop of generally increased losses of military equipment, the scale of Russian losses in motor transport is staggering (see Chart 2). In June, according to Ukraine’s General Staff, they reached 12,900 vehicles, almost four times higher than the 2025 monthly average of 3,300. Over the past four months, the growth in motor-vehicle losses has been exponential. The analyst Clément Molin geolocated 784 Russian trucks hit by Ukrainian drones in May-June. Here, too, there is exponential growth: in May, 214 destroyed vehicles were geolocated, an average of seven per day; in June, 570, or 19 per day; and in the final ten days of June, 295, or 29 per day. As a result, motor transport, and trucks in particular, may for a time become one of the bottlenecks of Russian logistics. Russia as a whole has a sufficient quantity of freight transport, around 2.5 million vehicles, and production capacity substantially exceeds current demand; but the logistics of mobilizing motor transport for the needs of the occupied territories and the front may pose a problem.

An even more important June trend was the AFU offensive against bridges. Since the start of the month, at least 26 strikes have been carried out against bridges in the occupied territories, including 16 against road bridges and 10 against railway bridges. Almost 80 percent of them hit bridges and crossings linking the peninsula with the mainland: Chonhar, Henichesk, and Perekop-Armiansk. One of the main targets here was the Chonhar Bridge, built back in the early nineteenth century as an alternative to the natural Perekop Isthmus. Ukrainian drones attacked it three times, and after the second attack, on June 9, it was at least temporarily put out of action. As a result, the Russian army had to create pontoon crossings and reroute some transport carrying fuel and ammunition through Armiansk, where the AFU successfully attacked it, explained Dmytro “Perun” Filatov, commander of a Ukrainian assault regiment.

Besides Chonhar, the AFU most often struck bridges in the Armiansk area, on the Perekop Isthmus: five strikes in all against various bridges, including two against the road bridge near the settlement of Stavky. The bridge across the Henichesk Strait was also attacked three times, on June 8, 15, and 20. In addition, the AFU is striking key bridges inside Crimea as well: the bridge near Rozdolne, for example, came under attack three times in five days, on June 18, 22, and 23, and after the third strike was completely destroyed.

At present, media attention is focused chiefly on the effects of the Ukrainian drone offensive for the supply of Crimea. Yet a natural and no less important consequence of this offensive will be a sharp weakening of supply to the occupied territories in Zaporizhzhia and especially Kherson regions. At the same time, the sustained attack on the system of bridges and isthmuses leading into Crimea is, in effect, blocking the alternative supply corridor for the Russian-occupied territories in the south, aside from the Novorossiya highway, where a grouping of more than 150,000 troops is located, according to Ukrainian sources.

In mid-June, Vladyslav Voloshyn, spokesman for Ukraine’s Southern Defense Forces, said that as a result of the strikes on bridges, the number of enemy assault actions on the southern sectors of the front had decreased. Some Ukrainian experts say outright that the main purpose of the blockade of Crimea is to cut the supply routes of the southern grouping of Russian troops. Yevhen Dykyi, a former company commander in the Aidar Battalion, recalls the situation that developed in Kherson in 2022, when the blockade on the right bank of the Dnipro forced Surovikin, then commander of the grouping, to take the “difficult decision” to withdraw Russian troops from the right bank. “What I am now seeing in the Azov region is less about a landing operation and more about a ‘difficult decision,’” he concludes.

There are not many details about the situation in the occupied part of Kherson region, which is in an especially vulnerable position. In early May, Ukrainian authorities said the population there was on the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe; later, this was confirmed by a UN mission on the basis of interviews with residents. Reports by the local Russian-language outlet Bloknot-Kherson show that a severe fuel crisis and power outages have been continuing for several weeks. On July 7, the head of the occupation administration of Kherson region, Vladimir Saldo, announced that he was introducing a state of “technogenic emergency” because of a blackout in 207 settlements, but soon deleted his post. The Russian leadership is clearly trying to conceal the real state of affairs.

On June 25, Volodymyr Zelensky announced the start of a 40-day SBU operation to force Russia to end the war, without explaining exactly what he meant. In its summary of June’s military results, the OSINT group DeepState notes that “a turning point is ripening in the war, and the development of the situation will depend on the actions of the Ukrainian command.” The next month and a half should answer the key question of military strategy at the present stage in the development of drone warfare: can dominance in the lower sky, aimed at paralyzing the enemy’s logistics and supply channels, be transformed into a change in the situation and in zones of control on the ground?

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