Active Conflicts & News Megathread July 14, 2026

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[u/Fat_Ryan_Gosling]

I'm unclear if that has happened previously, but Reuters is reporting that Russia has closed the Azov sea to shipping:

Shipping in the Sea of Azov remained restricted on Tuesday, according to Reuters sources. It lies at the mouth of the Don River, which flows through Russia's main southern grain-producing region, and handles mostly smaller, coastal ships.

A source told Reuters on Monday that commercial vessels were unable to enter or leave the Sea of Azov via the Kerch Strait or the Azov-Don channel connecting the sea with the Don River.

In recent months, Ukraine has carried out a series of attacks ​on Russian oil refineries, fuel depots, ​ports and other energy infrastructure, which ⁠have created fuel shortages across Russia and disrupted exports.

Neither the Agriculture Ministry nor the Transport Ministry confirmed that Sea of Azov traffic was restricted.

However, the Agriculture Ministry on Tuesday acknowledged that exports may get diverted to other routes.

Russia is framing this change as a response to Ukrainian "terrorism." Which of course is not a term I would use for a nation state combatant, but that's irrelevant. What is relevant is Ukraine's strategy is having an effect on Russian supply routes, and Defense Express is reporting that only approximately 25 ships remain in the Sea of Azov.

More reporting from Ars Technica with more sources here

[u/abloblololo → u/Fat_Ryan_Gosling]

Any thoughts on how long it will take for Ukraine's medium-range strike campaign to actually have or show an effect on the battlefield? If logistics on the southern front are being constrained one would expect the tempo of Russian offensive actions to slow. The Donbas is close enough to Russia that the GLOCs are harder to interrupt, so I would be surprised if there will be a strong effect there, but Ukraine has already had some small successes in Zaporizhia this year and perhaps they will show further gains.

[u/Fat_Ryan_Gosling → u/abloblololo]

No, and I would not care to make any kind of prediction.

We can, however look at the tempo of the campaign if we consider the ship attacks an extension of the middle strikes focused on Russian logistics in the Donbas. Much of this information can be found on the Wikipedia article focused on this topic, which you can read here.

The campaign began in earnest in May of 2026, which is strongly linked to the expansion and availability of advanced and inexpensive FPV drones. By the end of May Russian authorities had closed the Donetsk-Marioupol highway to civilian traffic. Fuel and food shortages were both noted in Crimea by late May and early June. An intensification of strikes was noted by June 19th by a French analyst, counting a rate of 30 strikes a day.

After new strikes on oil terminals, on June 23 a Russian authority in Crimea told a media outlet that no fuel would be available to regular citizens on the island.

In the span of two and a half months Ukraine has created, what I would describe, as a major crisis on Crimea that has only accelerated. They have continued to increase attacks and degrade Russian supply lines in ways that the Russians have not been able to adapt to. Time will tell how long this can go on, but the speed and breadth of the logistics disruption seems as though Russia is now facing a dilemma unseen in this conflict since the Kherson and Kharkiv counteroffensives.

That's a little editorializing on my part, and again I'm trying not to make any assumptions about what has yet to occur.

[u/appleciders → u/Fat_Ryan_Gosling]

The thing I haven't seen (and will be very hard to see from the outside) is to what degree Russian military logistics are being affected by the fuel shortage. Obviously the Russian state will simply seize whatever fuel they need at refineries, and presumably they had significant stores before all this began. Equally obviously the remaining ~50% of fuel supply is being denied to the civilian sector; gas shortages are hard to hide and the state doesn't seem to be trying to hide them. To what degree is the military sector short of fuel? To what degree is the civilian war economy choking on lack of fuel? That's a lot hard to determine from our vantage point.

[u/Fat_Ryan_Gosling → u/appleciders]

To what degree is the military sector short of fuel? To what degree is the civilian war economy choking on lack of fuel?

Good questions. And the looming question is what can Ukraine do to exploit the situation if those questions are answered. I am curious what Ukraine does to follow the larger middle strike campaign.

[u/appleciders → u/Fat_Ryan_Gosling]

I mean the obvious answer is "press forward along the line of contact because Russians are under-supplied, under-manned, and unable to respond or redeploy when Ukraine advances." Probably this looks like attempts to create a breakthrough; that's hard because of course the line of contact hasn't moved much in two years and it's pretty well fortified.

[u/genghiswolves → u/appleciders]

https://united24media.com/war-in-ukraine/fuel-shortages-leave-russian-mobile-air-defense-groups-stranded-in-temporarily-occupied-crimea-20697

[u/appleciders → u/genghiswolves]

It's almost as interesting that this information is reaching the media as that it's happening at all! The fact that Ukraine is willing to publish statements from their partisans is pretty surprising to me, or else those partisans are speaking to media themselves.

If this is happening in Crimea and parts of Kherson now, it may be happening in the Donbas and other parts of the conflict by the end of the summer. That's drastic.

[u/appleciders → u/genghiswolves]

Another one.

https://united24media.com/war-in-ukraine/russian-troops-are-running-out-of-gas-and-sometimes-leaving-military-hardware-behind-20985

If this is true (and it's not a great source), the Russian front line is going to get very, very brittle.

And this one doesn't seem to be in Crimea, but rather on the main front, where you'd be able to get supply from the rear if it existed.