In Reply to: They fall for it every time. Two stories posted by mh on May 25, 2026 at 09:11:37
It is really happening … and without a lot of hoopla. Ukraine is quietly doing something remarkable, amazing even … effectively cutting Putin’s much cherished dream “legacy project” and one of the major predicates for his aggression against Ukraine … creating a “land bridge” along Ukraine’s Azov sea board linking occupied Crimea(via the Kerch Bridge) to southern Ukraine and Russia along the M14 International Highway. By making it impossible for Russia to use the M14(and its connection to the R-280 at Dzhankoi in Crimea), Ukraine is slowly but effectively cutting off the Russian Army in southern Ukraine from its main supply route. Russia’s huge army now deployed in southern Ukraine(Donetsk, Dnipropetrovsk and Zaporizhia) could be slowly starved of the requisite supplies in the field.
The Kerch Bridge, too will come down … when the time is right. For now Ukraine sees value in letting it stay up, as it is consuming a fair amount of Russia’s increasingly scarce air defense and naval assets to protect it.
Unlike the much hyped Summer 2023 counteroffensive which basically had the same end goal, Ukraine is doing it without putting a single infantry boot on the ground along the land bridge. Not yet, anyway. To think that in 2023 Ukraine placed tens of thousands of troops, thousands of armor and equipment into the deadly maw of the “Surovikin Wall” … to no avail.
According to analyst Jan Kallberg, back in the 2023 counteroffensive, the goal of the Ukrainian general staff was to push far enough overland to get within artillery range of the “land bridge” in order to interdict Russian logistics: