Ukraine attacks Russian warship in occupied Crimea
A Ukrainian attack struck a Russian warship moored in Crimea early Tuesday, in what appeared to be one of the most significant attacks on Moscow’s prized Black Sea Fleet in months.
The Ukrainian Air Force said this a statement that it had destroyed the Novocherkassk, a large landing ship, in the southeastern Crimean port of Feodosia during the night. The Russian Ministry of Defense said this the state news agency Tass that the ship was damaged in an attack using “aircraft-guided missiles,” but did not say whether the ship was permanently disabled.
Videos of the attack which appeared to have been captured by local residents and released by the Ukrainian Air Force, showed a massive explosion that caused a large fireball, followed by a giant cloud of smoke and fire billowing into the night sky. The images could not immediately be verified, but Sergei Aksyonov, the Russian-installed governor of Crimea, said the attack had caused a fire in Feodosia. One person was killed and two others were injured in the attack, he added.
“The fleet in Russia is getting smaller!” Mykola Oleshchuk, the commander of the Ukrainian Air Force, wrote in one post on the Telegram messaging app celebrating the strike, which he noted came afterward Ukrainian missiles sank the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet last year.
The Ukrainian military has long maintained that the war cannot be won without targeting Russian assets and operations in Crimea Moscow was illegally annexed in 2014.
Ukraine has done just that in recent months greatly accelerated the pace of attacks on the peninsulawhich the Russian military uses as a logistics hub for its hold on southern Ukraine – storing fuel, ammunition and other supplies to be funneled to the battlefields – as well as as a launching pad for attacks on Ukraine.
The Black Sea Fleet has been used to launch devastating precision cruise missile attacks deep into Ukraine. In an effort to reduce the threat, the Ukrainian military has done just that this year they repeatedly targeted the fleet – claims in September to killed his commander.
Those attacks were important achievements for a country without its own warships and rare successes in a year marked by disappointing attempts to break Russian defense lines on the battlefield.
Ukraine’s air force said it used cruise missiles in Tuesday’s attack, which took place around 2:30 a.m. local time. Russian news media reported that the 110-meter-long Novocherkassk was capable of carrying up to 10 tanks and 340 troops.
The Ukrainian military said it suspected the ship was carrying Iranian-made attack drones for use in the war. Natalia Humeniuk, spokeswoman for the Ukrainian army in the south, told national television that “it is clear that such a large explosion was not caused only by fuel or ammunition from the ship itself.”
Andrii Klymenko, the head of the Institute for Strategic Studies of the Black Sea, agreed. “Judging from the video of the explosion, which was very powerful, it carried explosives: grenades or rockets, or, as some people say, drones,” he wrote in a text message.