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Drones and the Sea of Azov: Ukraine’s Asymmetric Bid to Turn Russia’s Logistical Rear into a Battlefield

Picture of Viktor Trumbetas

Viktor Trumbetas

Analysis Series

Analysis/0057/July/2026/London-Dialogue. 31 July 2026

For most of the full-scale war, the Sea of Azov was Russia's quiet corner. After occupying Ukraine's entire Azov coastline in 2022, Moscow treated the shallow, landlocked sea as a secure rear area, a waterway President Vladimir Putin claimed had become an internal Russian route, and a launch platform for earlier assaults on Mariupol, Berdiansk and Melitopol. In July 2026 that assumption collapsed. In just over a week, Ukraine's Unmanned Systems Forces reported striking well over a hundred Russian vessels there, and by mid-month independent trackers were recording a near-total evaporation of shipping traffic. The temptation is to read this as a naval offensive, an attempt to "take" the Azov or wrest control of its waters. That reading misses the point. Ukraine is not trying to conquer the Sea of Azov or to establish maritime supremacy. It has no surface fleet in the sea and capabilities to form one up so far. The objective of the drone campaign is narrower and, strategically, more corrosive: to transform a space Russia treated as a safe logistical hinterland into a permanently contested operational environment, driving up the cost of supply and export and the maintenance of occupied territory. In doing so, the sea of Azov is being promoted from an auxiliary maritime theatre into one of the more active arenas of maritime and particularly logistical warfare in this war.

Tactics of sea denial

The commander of Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces, Major Robert “Madyar” Brovdi, has been unusually explicit about the logic. The operation, dubbed “MoLoChKa,” is not designed to seize terrain or destroy the Kerch Bridge that anchors Russia’s hold on Crimea but quite the opposite. Instead of striking the bridge, Brovdi described the approach as cutting off the routes into Crimea while deliberately leaving the exits open. “We are not touching the Kerch Bridge; let them get out through it.” This is the vocabulary of sea denial, rather than classical sea control. Sea control means being able to use a maritime space for one’s own purposes and national power of states; sea denial simply means ensuring the adversary cannot safely use it either. Ukraine has concluded correctly, given its resources, that it does not need to sail the Azov to make it unusable for Russia. A steady tempo of cheap, expendable strike drones is enough to induce permanent risk into every voyage of the military and commercial fleet, giving an injection to the tactic that the sea does not need to be won, but it only needs to stop being safe. The strategic value of that distinction is that it plays to Ukraine’s comparative advantage. Building a fleet capable of contesting the Azov would take years and money Kyiv does not have. Saturating it with uncrewed systems is a problem Ukraine has already largely solved elsewhere, and the 413th Separate Regiment of Unmanned Systems‘s commander, Major Evhen Karas, framed the payoff bluntly: Ukraine’s ability to strike farther at ever-lower cost “has become a problem the Russians can’t solve”.

What distinguishes this campaign from Ukraine’s earlier war against the Black Sea Fleet is the choice of targets. The 2022–2024 Black Sea effort concentrated on warships and pushed Russia’s navy east and out of the western basin. The Azov operation instead goes after the unglamorous commercial vessels that keep Russian logistics functioning. The priority target, according to Brovdi, is Russia’s fleet of small and medium “feeder” tankers—shallow-draft ships roughly 140 metres long carrying around 7,000 tonnes. Because many Russian and occupied ports are too shallow for oceangoing tankers, crude and products must first be carried out on these feeders and transferred to larger ships waiting offshore. A single oceangoing tanker is typically filled from twelve to fifteen feeder runs. Paralyse the feeders, and the whole export chain running from Russian terminals through the Volga-Don Canal and the Azov to the Black Sea begins to seize. Alongside them, Ukraine is targeting the sanctioned “shadow fleet” tankers that move Russian oil around Western restrictions, plus the dry-cargo ships, ferries and tugboats that hold the wider network together. Tugboats are a shrewd choice: without them, damaged vessels cannot be recovered and large ships cannot manoeuvre in port. Ukraine’s General Staff reported hitting six tankers and two tugboats in the Black Sea and Azov in a single night in mid-July, alongside the Syvash railway bridge near Chongar and a road bridge near Prymorsk, both military logistics arteries. Brovdi’s running tally reached 116 vessels in nine days by 14 July and 136 by 15 July. These figures come from a party to the conflict and cannot be completely independently verified.The strikes are not the same as sinkings, and some “hits” reflect damage rather than destruction. But the secondary evidence, what the ships themselves are now doing, corroborates the broader picture.

Measuring the effect of the Ukrainian campaign

Independent monitoring suggests the campaign is already reshaping the behaviour of Russian commercial and tanker fleets. The Institute for the Study of War, citing Starboard Maritime Intelligence data, recorded a roughly 55 percent drop in vessels broadcasting active AIS transponder signals in the Azov between 30 June and 11 July. ISW’s George Barros noted that the ships still operating were hugging ports and coastlines rather than crossing open water and that switching off transponders offers little protection because in a sea these small vessels remain findable via synthetic-aperture-radar satellite imagery, some of it commercially available. The only effective countermeasure he had observed, he said, was simply moving fewer ships. Separate analysis cited by open-source trackers put traffic at 132 vessels on 6 July, falling to 43 by 12 July, with mostly small craft such as tugs left behind. The Russian response followed in a way that it temporarily suspended shipping through the Don-Azov Canal after the strikes, and border guards stopped accepting passage requests for the Kerch Strait—choking both the entrance from Russia’s inland waterways and the exit to the Black Sea. Satellite imagery and vessel-tracking services showed long queues of ships waiting on both sides of the sea. This is precisely the outcome sea denial is meant to produce: not to fully sink a fleet (although that is a desirable goal), but a network that stops moving.

The economic dimension

The Azov’s importance far exceeds its size. It is a critical link in the Soviet-built system of rivers and canals that carries oil, grain, steel and other commodities from vast stretches of southern Russia to the Black Sea and onwards to global markets. Roughly a quarter of Russian wheat exports normally transit the Azov, and Russia supplies about a fifth of the world’s traded wheat. Agricultural-markets analyst Andrey Sizov captured the stakes with an analogy that has given the crisis its nickname: for the wheat market, the Black Sea is what the Persian Gulf is to crude oil—the single largest supplier to the world. Wheat futures rose in part on the disruption, and Sizov warned that Russian losses could run into the billions if it persists. Moscow, however, insists it can adapt to the newly emerged situation. Russia’s Agriculture Ministry said it was preparing “alternative shipping routes” and shifting cargo to other transport modes and maintained the situation would affect neither domestic food supply nor export capacity. But analysts are sceptical that deeper Black Sea terminals can absorb Azov volumes during peak harvest season, when total Russian grain exports comfortably exceed those ports’ capacity. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, meanwhile, denounced the campaign as going “beyond even piracy” and amounting to terrorism, rhetoric that, whatever its legal merits, signals how much the disruption stings.

The Azov campaign is not a free-standing one. It is the maritime component of a wider effort to strangle Crimean peninsula. Ukraine has spent months degrading the peninsula’s supply lines—damaging rail and vehicle ferries, striking fuel depots, and hitting the road, rail and bridge links of the “land bridge” through occupied territory. The Azov Sea strikes close to the seaborne fallback. Major Karas, of the 413th Separate UAS Regiment, argued that Russia has turned Crimea into one large military base sustaining forces pushing deeper into Ukraine; cut the logistics, and the base will wither. The pressure is registering on the ground. Russian-installed authorities declared a state of emergency in Crimea amid power disruptions and fuel shortages, with the occupation utility imposing electricity restrictions. ISW’s assessment is that the strikes constitute a “new phase” in isolating the peninsula and disrupting seaborne routes for petroleum products and grain.

Russia's dilemma

What makes the campaign strategically dangerous for Moscow is, for now, the considerable deprivation of its options. A serving Russian general reportedly told a Russian journalist that Russia cannot effectively counter Ukraine’s intermediate-range strikes, in part because the General Staff dissolved the Crimean Defence Group in 2024 after judging it had too few naval assets to protect the peninsula. The result is an occupation force whose road, rail and now maritime supply routes are all under fire simultaneously. The Azov operation also compounds a separate crisis. Ukraine’s parallel long-range campaign against refineries; the repeated strikes on the Tuapse refinery, which caused a severe coastal oil-pollution incident and knocked the plant largely offline, plus hits on facilities from Krasnodar to Bashkortostan, has already helped push Russia into banning some fuel exports amid domestic shortages. Even Russian commentators have begun questioning whether the Kremlin is losing its grip on the logistics reality of Crimea. Refinery strikes constrain how much of the product exists, and now Azov strikes constrain how it moves and reaches its customers. Together they attack both the supply and the distribution of the fuel that sustains the war effort and the occupation.

A template for asymmetric (democratized) sea denial

The deeper significance of the Azov campaign lies in what it demonstrates about maritime warfare. A non-naval power, Ukraine, using systems costing a tiny fraction of the ships they target, without deploying a single warship, has imposed something close to a functional blockade on a sea an adversary (in this case Russia) considered sovereign of its own. The resulting effect is achieved not by waging a campaign of winning battles at sea but by making the calculus of every adversary’s voyage untenable: raise the probability of loss high enough and traffic self-suppresses, as Barros observed when he noted that the main countermeasure on display was simply sailing less. We could call this new warfare evolution a democratised sea denial. It suggests that in contested littorals, cheap uncrewed strike systems paired with commercial satellite reconnaissance can contest maritime spaces that once required serious naval fleets to control. For Russia, the immediate consequence is a compounding logistical squeeze on Crimea and a threat to non-sanctioned exports it had assumed were beyond Kyiv’s reach. For observers elsewhere, from the Baltic to the Taiwan Strait, the Azov offers a live case study in how a weaker maritime actor can hold a stronger one’s shipping at risk. In this case, at least temporarily taking away Russia’s ability to treat its littoral sea as safe delivers a strategic effect achieved not from naval mastery but from the permanent imposition of risk.

Picture of Viktor Trumbetas

Viktor Trumbetas

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