Kyiv, Ukraine – After almost seven hours in a kilometres-long, snail-paced line made up of hundreds of cars at a gas station near Crimea’s administrative capital, Simferopol, Dilyaver was lucky enough to buy gas.
He paid $22 for 20 litres (5.3 gallons).
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“There were teenagers running around offering gas for 300 rubles [$4.2], one almost got beaten up by angry guys in the line,” the 52-year-old Crimean Tatar man told Al Jazeera on Saturday.
He withheld his last name and personal details because an interview with foreign media could land him in jail.
Judging by licence plates and accents, some of the men in the line were Russian tourists who decided to cut their vacations short and flee via the $4bn, 19km (12-mile) long Crimean Bridge, Dilyaver said.
“The [tourism] season is ruined, that’s bad news for almost everyone here,” he said, referring to the annual arrival of millions of tourists that feeds many on the arid peninsula, where agriculture has suffered after Kyiv dammed a key water artery.
Dilyaver does not know when he will fill up his rundown Skoda again because he expects fuel shortages to get worse.
But the fuel problem is just the tip of the iceberg of problems Crimea has been facing.
“Crimea’s key problem is not because there’s no fuel,” Nikolay Mitrokhin, a researcher with Germany’s Bremen University who analyses the Russia-Ukraine war, told Al Jazeera. “The problem is that Ukrainian drones began barraging over the peninsula’s domestic roads.”
Since mid-May, Ukrainian drones have attacked hundreds of trucks carrying fuel, ammunition and other supplies from southwestern Russia to Crimea via the “land bridge” through occupied Ukrainian regions.
The drones, whose operators sit in bunkers up to 200km (124 miles) away from the “land bridge”, also pepper roads with mines that weigh only 500 grams (1.1 pounds) and have magnetic or motion sensors.
Cargo ships trying to get fuel and food to Crimea or transporting steel and grain from occupied regions of southeastern Ukraine have also been attacked.
The attacks “illustrate Crimea’s vulnerability”. Volodymyr Fesenko, head of the Kyiv-based Penta think tank, told Al Jazeera. “Ukraine can regularly, daily strike military, infrastructure sites in Crimea … Ukraine turned Crimea into an island surrounded by war and fire.”
‘Just the beginning’
Ukraine’s Third Special Battalion said earlier this month that its drone operators have “taken aerial control” of the strategic supply route from the occupied southern city of Melitopol to the Chongar bridge in northern Crimea.
“That’s just the beginning! There’s more to come!” the Battalion said in a Facebook video with footage of exploding and burning trucks.
Chongar is a key entry to Crimea that can barely be called a peninsula because Sivash, also known as The Rotten Sea, a labyrinth of lagoons, salt marshes and wetlands, divides it from mainland Ukraine, leaving only three strips of land wide and firm enough for roads and a railway.
Just more than a week ago, the Chongar bridge was damaged by drones and is only capable of letting light vehicles through, while buses and trucks take a pontoon bridge nearby.
“The bridge is open, the damaged part is cordoned off, one lane is operational, there are no traffic jams because there’s few cars,” a driver who passed through it wrote on Telegram.
Ukrainian drones also struck fuel depots inside Crimea – along with air defence systems, airfields, military bases, command centres and the facilities of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet that relocated to the Russian port of Novorossiysk after losing at least a third of its vessels.
After Russia’s annexation of the peninsula in 2014, Moscow spent billions of dollars to militarise Crimea by deploying frigates and diesel submarines; advanced S-400 air defence systems; tens of thousands of servicemen; and building new military bases, airfields, radar stations, garrisons and living quarters.
“Putin turned Crimea into a military base, and thus made it the most vulnerable place in the war with Ukraine,” Fesenko said.
The Crimean bridge alone cannot handle the redirected traffic as trucks weighing more than 1.5 tonnes are no longer allowed to pass through.
Early Monday, a Ukrainian drone struck a moving train, killing one of the drivers and prompting Moscow to halt the movement of nine other trains.
Their passengers are being evacuated by buses, Kremlin-appointed authorities said.
Days earlier, one of Russia’s most outspoken warmongers raised his voice about the panic in Crimea.
“What’s happening at Crimean gas stations is a real nightmare for locals and servicemen,” Igor Girkin, an ex-intelligence officer who led the first group of Moscow-backed separatists in southeastern Ukraine in 2014, wrote on Telegram on June 1.
Kyiv “acts brazenly … trying to cut off the peninsula and our southern [military] groups from fuel supply,” Girkin, who was sentenced to four years in jail in 2024 after lambasting Moscow’s military failures in Ukraine, wrote from behind bars.
“To some, Crimea seems like a resort. No, today it’s a front-line region,” he wrote.
And to Crimean Tatars such as Dilyaver, what’s happening around them is part of a decades-old struggle for survival in Moscow’s shadow.
Since the annexation, his community of about 250,000, or about one-tenth of Crimea’s population, has been under constant pressure.
Masked officers break into the houses of community leaders, activists or observant Muslims at dawn to search for “extremist materials” that in many cases turn out to be religious texts, including The Quran for Children.
Arrests and trials follow – more than 100 Tatars have been sentenced to jail for “extremism,” “separatism” and “terrorism.”
Another dozen went missing without a trace and are believed to have been abducted and killed by Russian intelligence.
Dilyaver owned a tiny grocery store near Simferopol.
But he faced higher taxes and visits by government inspectors who demanded bribes, so Dilyaver, who also suffered a scam, closed the store. He barely makes ends meet now by selling deep-fried meat and cheese pies next to a bus stop.
Dilyaver’s parents were born in Soviet Uzbekistan after the 1944 deportation of every Crimean Tatar by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, who thought their cultural ties to Turkiye posed a threat to the USSR’s security.
“We have a saying, ‘If a Russian lives next to you, keep an axe ready,’” Dilyaver’s 77-year-old mother Gulsum told Al Jazeera. “We suffered from them so much, and it’s far from over.”
Ukrainian attacks triggered food shortages.
Macaroni, flour, canned meat, fish and vegetables have already been swept off the shelves in some stores and supermarkets, Dilyaver said.
“The Soviet mentality is still at work. If there’s a problem – buy buckwheat,” he quipped, about the cheap and nutritious grain that symbolises resilience in the former Soviet Union.
