“Due to damage to the Čonhar bridge, the enemy concentrated a large number of trucks with military supplies on the road leading through Armjansk,” explained Filatov. “As a result, we managed to hit trucks with fuel and ammunition. There were about five dozen of them and many of them were destroyed,” he described according to the newspaper Ukrainska Pravda.
According to Filatov, the Čonhar bridge in the temporarily occupied territory, which is on the road connecting the occupied part of the Kherson region with the annexed Crimea, is currently unusable due to critical structural damage after the drone attack.
“The occupiers are trying to create alternative supply routes, especially using pontoon bridges,” he said. He noted that attacks on logistics routes have already disrupted the supply of Russian troops.
According to The Guardian, Ukrainian drones mainly attack highways and other roads connecting the occupied territories of Ukraine with Russia. They mainly focus on the R-280 highway, which leads from Russian Rostov-on-Don through the occupied territories of Ukraine to the annexed Crimea.
The Russians call this highway Novorussko – just like the occupied territories illegally annexed to the Russian Federation.
For Moscow, this road, which has been almost completely closed to civilian traffic since the end of last month, has a special meaning. It is the main corridor for the ground supply of Russian forces in the south, which bypasses the very vulnerable Crimean (Kerch) Bridge.
According to the commander of the Ukrainian unmanned systems units, Robert “Hungarian” Brovdy, systematic attacks by Ukrainian drones on roads, railways and bridges caused Russian military cargo traffic on the R-280 to drop by 71 percent in recent weeks.
The Russians remembered the siege of Leningrad
At the end of May, the governor of the occupied part of the Kherson region, Vladimir Saldo, signed a decree restricting the movement of civilian trucks on R-280. He compared Ukrainian drone attacks to the siege of Leningrad (today’s St. Petersburg) during World War II.
“This is cynical barbarism. In their cruelty, these actions remind us of the fascist blockade of Leningrad, when the enemy tried to intimidate people, cut off connections between territories and break the will of the civilian population,” he said. Ukrainian drone operators could not have asked for a better proof of their success, the paper noted.
According to him, the Ukrainians are not revealing the details of their new tactics, but “a key element will probably be that they use swarms of drones for attacks, in such numbers that it apparently surprised the Russian forces.”
Ukrainian drone operators, including operators of the 412th “Nemesis” brigade, report that dozens of trucks and tankers were destroyed in the course of the campaign. According to The Guardian, Ukrainian two-meter light fixed-wing drones, known as Morrigan, and American Hornet drones were used in the attacks.
These drones, the size of a surfboard with a range of about 150 kilometers, are used almost continuously in the area to patrol and bomb Russian convoys. One of the immediate effects of their action is the lack of fuel in the occupied Crimea, the paper stated.
