Ukraine’s punishing drone bombardment of Russia has expanded from oil and gas infrastructure and the Kremlin’s shadow tanker fleet to systematic targeting of the power grid in the Russia-occupied Crimea peninsula.Tens of thousands of residents of the Black Sea territory invaded and annexed by the Kremlin in 2014 and called by President Vladimir Putin “an inescapable part of Russian territory” have been without power for a week or more, with homes and businesses in Crimea’s poorer northern steppe districts the worst-hit.JOIN US ON TELEGRAMFollow our coverage of the war on the @Kyivpost_official.Crimea’s 2.3 million residents, along with visitors to the territory’s resort-dense southern coast, had already been grappling with near-catastrophic automobile fuel shortages following weeks of Ukrainian drone raids against Crimea’s fuel storage sites and the arrival of incoming ship and truck tanker fuel shipments from the Russian mainland.The widened Ukrainian campaign taking on Crimea’s power grid kicked off in earnest in early July. Repeated follow-up strikes have focused on transmission nodes, with strike packages of five to 20 drones hitting a Kyiv-claimed number of five to 20 targets a night.The Simferopol Combined Cycle Thermal Power Plant, a major natural-gas-fired facility, known locally as the Tavriyska TPP (or Tavria TPP), was an early priority target in that campaign – with Ukrainian kamikaze aircraft scoring confirmed hits in three air raids from June 20 to 25.