The Black Sea Fortress
Crimea, twelve years after annexation: what has changed on the peninsula, between Russian construction, Ukrainian strikes and new coastal defences
by Piero Boccardo
When Russia formally annexed Crimea on 18 March 2014, the peninsula was a tourist destination with a Soviet heritage and a large naval base. Twelve years later, it is one of the most militarised and most struck territories on the European continent. Almost everything we know about what it looks like today comes from orbit: on the island — because Crimea has, in effect, become a political island — one cannot move freely, and local documentation is filtered through a Russian propaganda system that leaves no room for independent verification. High-resolution commercial satellites, particularly Planet’s SkySat and Pelican fleet, have photographed every significant development over the past twelve years: construction sites, attacks, reconstructions, new defences. What follows is an atlas in thirteen images.
The bridge
The Crimea Bridge across the Kerch Strait, completed in 2018, is the material symbol of the annexation: nineteen kilometres of road and rail carriageway connecting the peninsula to the Russian mainland of Krasnodar. It has been attacked twice. The first strike came on 8 October 2022, attributed to Ukrainian intelligence, and destroyed two road spans while severely damaging the railway section. The second, on 17 July 2023, hit the road carriageway with Ukrainian naval drones.
The naval base
Sevastopol has for nearly two and a half centuries been the main base of the Russian Black Sea Fleet. Following the sinking of the cruiser Moskva in April 2022, and the missile strike on the Black Sea Fleet headquarters in September 2023, Russia progressively transferred a significant portion of its surface units to Novorossiysk, on the Russian eastern Black Sea coast. Sevastopol nonetheless remains the most important military port on the peninsula, and the evolution of its naval presence is one of the most explicit indicators of the state of the conflict.
The struck airfields
On 9 August 2022, a series of explosions devastated the Saky naval air base on the western coast of Crimea. It was the first visible demonstration — for the international public as well — that the war had reached the annexed territory. At least a dozen aircraft — among them Su-24s, Su-30s and Be-12s — were destroyed.
Almost two years later, on 17 April 2024, Ukrainian forces struck Dzhankoy airfield in the north of the peninsula with US-supplied ATACMS tactical missiles, destroying an unspecified number of Mi-8 helicopters and S-400 air-defence batteries.
Air defences
Following the 2022–2024 attacks, Russia deployed in Crimea one of the densest air-defence systems on the entire front: S-400 and S-300 batteries along the coasts, mobile Pantsir and Buk systems covering the bases, long-range radar. The rationale is to protect the western flank of the peninsula from further missile strikes and long-range drone incursions.
Dragon’s teeth
Between 2023 and 2025, continuous lines of “dragon’s teeth” appeared along the southern and western coasts of Crimea — pyramid-shaped concrete blocks originally developed in the Soviet era to stop armoured vehicles — placed in close sequence on the beach, often in double or triple rows. These are anti-landing fortifications, designed to obstruct a potential Ukrainian amphibious operation, considered a not-remote possibility following the success of certain naval drone operations.
The fortress
Thirteen images, five sites, twelve years. The Crimea that emerges from this atlas is not that of a consolidated military occupation, but that of a fortress in permanent tension: a territory that never stops being built while it is being struck, that produces defences while sustaining losses, that changes in morphology year after year under the eye of commercial satellites. From the ground, twelve years after annexation, almost no one enters Crimea anymore. From orbit, however, everything is visible.