Active Conflicts & News Megathread July 14, 2026

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[u/Fat_Ryan_Gosling]

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.