Ukraine's drone forces struck a string of Russian targets across occupied Crimea, Russia's Rostov Oblast, and the occupied south, Robert "Madyar" Brovdi, the commander of the Unmanned Systems Forces, said. The hits ran from a naval drone base and radar shelters on the peninsula to air-defense systems and a site Russia uses to launch attack drones. They feed a widening campaign to cut occupied Crimea off from what keeps it supplied.
A naval drone base and radar shelters struck in occupied Crimea
On 30 July, the Unmanned Systems Forces (SBS) reported strikes on a Russian base of naval uncrewed boats at Snizhne, near Yevpatoriia in occupied Crimea. Footage showed the hangars catching and a large blast rolling up from the site. The same night, drone crews hit the radio-transparent shelters of a radar station at Okhotnyche, on Ai-Petri above Yalta — the dome-shaped covers, or radomes, that shield a radar from the weather.
Both targets fell to fighters of the 9th battalion "Kairos" of the 414th "Madyar's Birds" Separate Brigade, Brovdi added.
A Buk caught on a trailer, radars from Crimea to Rostov
Further east, drone pilots struck a Russian Buk-M3 air-defense system near Snizhne in Donetsk Oblast while it was moving on a low-loader. That strike and a hit on a site at Donetsk airport, where Russia stores and launches Shahed attack drones, were the work of the "Phoenix" unmanned-aviation grouping within the Luhansk Border Detachment.
The radars came in a run. Crews struck a P-18 station at Ivanivka in Zaporizhzhia Oblast, a target of the 412th Brigade "Nemesis." Deeper in, they struck a Nebo-SVU radar at Russkiy Kolodets and a Sopka-2 complex at Fedorovka, both in Russia's Rostov Oblast. In all, the commander counted five air-defense elements hit that day, part of 30 downed by his units through July.
The sea blockade climbs, and the power squeeze goes on
The maritime side kept moving too. Ukraine's sea-drone campaign, codenamed MoLoChKa — short for "Moscow will fall through Crimea" — has now struck 205 vessels since it opened on 6 July, 130 in the Azov Sea and 75 in the Black Sea, Brovdi said. The fuel tankers that carry gasoline to the peninsula are a standing target of that hunt, and the effort to shred Russia's air cover over Crimea runs alongside it.
Across the whole grouping, SBS said its units struck or destroyed 1,758 enemy targets in a single day, and 50,109 since 1 July, according to its running statistics.
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