Russian Deputy Prime Minister Marat Khusnullin told state news agency TASS that the situation with Ukrainian drone attacks on the 'Novorossiya' highway has 'significantly improved' and that 'traffic has more or less recovered.' According to him, about 7,000 vehicles pass through the 'land bridge' to Crimea daily, nearly 3,000 of them trucks.
Khusnullin said he receives daily reports of downed drones and strikes on vehicles, 'mostly fuel tankers.' 'Any losses are, of course, painful and hard. Especially when people die. Sometimes they hit civilian cars too,' he said.
French OSINT analyst Clement Molin, who geolocates videos of strikes on Russian trucks, disputes these claims. His count shows Ukrainian forces hit 167 vehicles in occupied territories since the start of August. For comparison, in the first week of July, according to Molin's analysis, 240 trucks were struck.
Molin acknowledges that Russia has adapted to the attacks: using Starlink jammers, mobile fire groups (which, in his assessment, often become targets themselves), drone interceptor groups, and escort convoys. In total, he estimates up to 10,000 Russian servicemen are involved in mobile fire groups.
Continued strikes on the highway are also confirmed by posts from pro-Russian blogger Anatoly Shariy. He published videos of three burning trucks near the village of Obitochnaya in the Zaporizhzhia region and an attack on a convoy of fuel tankers, captioning them: 'The road to Crimea. They are burning everything in sight, primarily fuel tankers.'
According to Molin's calculations, over the past four months at least 1,623 Russian trucks and other vehicles have been struck by Ukrainian drones at a distance of more than 20 km from the front line.