Editor’s Note: this is an abridged holiday edition — one story instead of the usual slate. Full episode returns next week.​
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As Americans were celebrating 250 years since a ragtag militia defied the world's mightiest empire, Vladimir Putin was on the phone with Donald Trump, describing a battlefield that doesn't exist — Russian troops triumphant, victory in sight.
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But in the peninsula Putin calls as sacred to Russia as Jerusalem is to Jews and Muslims, an underdog just as unlikely was striking power stations and turning out the lights. The tide is turning in an empire's hard-won jewel.

Catherine the Liberator?

“I have no way to defend my borders but to extend them.”
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So Catherine the Great reportedly lamented in the mid-18th Century, articulating the imperial pathology that has driven Russian rulers to send their sons to slaughter for centuries.
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Catherine admired many European Enlightenment thinkers, but especially French philosophers. She corresponded with Voltaire until his death, hosted Diderot in St. Petersburg, and leaned heavily on Montesquieu’s political philosophy. She opened Russia's first state school for girls and spent two painstaking years drafting the Nakaz, an Enlightenment-inspired blueprint for reforming the Russian legal code.
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But when Enlightenment ideals collided with the demands of empire, Catherine chose empire every time.
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To secure hers, she waged two grinding wars against the Ottoman Empire. Her fleet sailed from the Baltic clear around Europe and incinerated the Ottoman navy, burning thousands of sailors in a single night. Her armies overran the Turkish fortresses of the Danube. By 1774, the sultan sued for peace, ceding to Russia its first true foothold on the Black Sea and prying Crimea loose from Ottoman control.
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Catherine formally annexed the peninsula in 1783, and thus ended the centuries-old Tatar slave raids that had dragged Slavic Christians south into Ottoman markets.
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To Europe, she portrayed it as Enlightenment liberation.
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But Catherine envisioned it as the first step of something larger: the “Greek Project,” a scheme to expel the Ottomans from Europe entirely and revive the Byzantine Empire. Crimea was the warm-water base for the Black Sea Fleet the whole plan required.
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She renamed the conquered coastline “Novorossiya”, or “New Russia,” and its fortress harbor “Sevastopol”, Greek for “city worthy of respect.” Catherine cast herself as the Orthodox sword against the Muslim empire to her south, extending Christendom by extending Russia.

Vlad the Terrible

Vladimir Putin has cast himself in exactly that role. He calls Catherine his favorite ruler, styles himself the defender of Orthodox civilization against a decadent West, and revived her word — Novorossiya — to rename the very Ukrainian territory his army now occupies.
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Same pathology, same Christian-vanguard vision, same map. Only the enemy has been reassigned: where Catherine invaded to drag Russia toward Enlightenment Europe, Putin invaded to wall it off from Europe entirely.

The Tides of History

243 years after Sevastopol was built to project Russian power outward, the tide is running the other way.
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Ukraine went for the radar first. A $100 million Russian system was destroyed, and the sky opened. Cheap, homemade drones followed, hunting everything that kept the peninsula supplied. Ukrainian drone strikes on the peninsula tripled in the first four months of this year.
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The ferries were halted. The Chonhar Bridge was struck, rebuilt with pontoons, then destroyed. Rail lines were severed. Kyiv calls the strategy a “logistics lockdown”: turn Crimea into an island, and let the occupation wither.
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What’s left of the Russian supply line runs through Rostov-on-Don, along a 390-mile highway that Russian and Ukrainian soldiers alike have taken to calling the “Highway of Death”. As Berlin-based journalist Paul Hockenos, writing for Foreign Policy, aptly put it:
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“Hundreds of burned-out and charred wrecks of tractor trailers, tanker trucks, and assorted military transports line the shoulders of Russia’s chief supply route to Crimea and occupied southern Ukraine from Russia proper. Mile after mile of vehicle carcasses lie overturned and jackknifed in roadside ditches, supply transports that never reached their destination.
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Since early April, wave after wave of Ukrainian drones have incapacitated the critical coastal route along the Sea of Azov and taken out Crimea’s northern bridges across the Chongar Strait. Ukrainian strikes have choked maritime supply routes and disrupted rail services, leaving the only practical route to Crimea the Kerch Bridge in easternmost Crimea. It is being hit, too, and now handles a fraction of previous traffic—most of which is exiting Crimea.”
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Then on July 4, Ukraine struck two electrical substations, leaving nearly all of Crimea’s 1.5 million residents in nighttime darkness, according to satellite imagery. Crimean authorities declared a state of emergency. Gasoline is now reserved for the state and the military; civilians are cut off entirely.
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Ukraine’s Defense Minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, delivered the verdict: “For the Russians, hell is beginning.”
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None of this means a Ukrainian victory is imminent. Free Press correspondent Aaron MacLean cautions that Russia’s ground offensive in the east keeps grinding forward, however slowly, even as these strikes squeeze its refineries and defense plants. A wounded war machine is not a defeated one.
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Today, Russia's Black Sea Fleet command has fled Sevastopol for Novorossiysk, out of Ukrainian range. The fortress Catherine raised to crown her conquest can no longer defend the empire that named it. And the values that made Catherine worthy of respect may survive a successor history will judge as worthy of none.
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