Ukraine’s drones cut Crimea’s fuel. Now, Russia can’t even move its political prisoners

Russia has stopped moving political prisoners out of occupied Crimea. For a week, no one convicted by the peninsula's Russian-controlled courts has been transferred off Crimea, halted first by Ukrainian strikes on the bridges to the mainland and now by a fuel shortage that has left nothing to run the prison vans, Crimean Tatar Mejlis member Eskender Bariiev says.

The frozen transfers are a byproduct of Ukraine's campaign to cut Crimea off. Weeks of strikes on bridges, fuel depots, and power plants have left the peninsula rationing electricity and out of petrol, and the occupation's prison logistics have seized up with everything else.

Detainees, Crimean Tatars and Ukrainians alike, have been told their stay in Simferopol's detention center is extended indefinitely.

Strikes seal off Crimea

Ukraine has hammered Crimea's supply network for weeks. Its drones struck both ends of the Crimean Bridge corridor on 21 June and have since forced occupation authorities to halt civilian fuel sales and impose rolling blackouts, with petrol gone from open sale and trams stopped in Yevpatoria.

Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov has described the campaign as turning Crimea from a peninsula into an island.

Detainees held in limbo

The halt traps two groups, Bariiev said: Crimeans sentenced by the occupation courts and Ukrainian citizens from newly seized territories who were brought to Crimea for hearings.

At first, he said, the occupiers held off transfers because moving prisoners under shelling was dangerous, though in his account, they feared for their own skins more than for the detainees.

Now there is simply no fuel for the transport vans. Russia has jailed scores of Crimean Tatars since 2014 on charges that Ukraine and rights groups call politically motivated.

Isolation exposes occupation strain

For Bariiev, the breakdown shows how brittle the occupation has become.

"The paralysis of penitentiary logistics has exposed the depth of the infrastructure crisis in Crimea," he wrote, saying the occupiers' military leadership cannot manage even basic internal functions and treats human life and rights as an afterthought.

The stalled transfers are one more sign of a peninsula sliding toward isolation.