Ukraine’s military claimed a “successful attack” on the headquarters of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet in annexed Crimea this Friday, leaving at least one person missing, in a bid to spread the conflict to that strategic peninsula.
The Ukrainian region annexed by Moscow in 2014 and the city of Sevastopol, home to the stricken Russian Navy headquarters, are at the center of Russia’s military plan for the invasion of Ukraine, both to supply troops occupying southern Ukraine. Occupy Ukraine as to transport troops occupying southern Ukraine. launch missile attacks from the sea.
“The enemy carried out a rocket attack on the fleet headquarters,” Sevastopol Governor Mikhail Razvoyaiev wrote on the digital platform Telegram.
The Russian Defense Ministry, which had initially announced the death of a soldier, later corrected this and stated that it was a missing person after all.
After a few hours of silence, the Strategic Communications Directorate of the Ukrainian Army congratulated the “successful attack on the headquarters of the command of the Russian Black Sea Fleet in the temporarily occupied city of Sevastopol,” also on Telegram.
The exact extent of the damage is still unknown, but Russian authorities admitted that the building was “damaged”.
Governor Razvoyaiev declared early in the afternoon that the building was on fire and that “the fight against the fire” continued.
The shockwave from the projectiles’ impact also shattered the windows of 10 residential buildings in the city center, but “no one was injured,” the official later added.
Debris was visible for hundreds of meters around the Russian fleet headquarters and many ambulances were on site, Russian news agency TASS reported.
According to the Russian military, five rockets were also shot down over Crimea.
Oleg Kriutchko, adviser to the peninsula’s Russian-installed leader, also announced a few hours after the attack that Crimea had been hit by an “unprecedented” cyberattack on companies providing internet services, which had caused signal disruptions.
But it did not say whether this computer attack was directly related to the Ukrainian bombing.
In recent weeks, Ukraine has intensified drone and missile attacks on Crimea, claiming the destruction of anti-aircraft systems, a naval shipyard and two ships there.
The Ukrainian armed forces plan to disrupt the Russian logistics chain on the one hand and put an end to Russian military dominance in the Black Sea on the other.
These Ukrainian successes highlight the difficulties of Russian air defenses as Ukraine, in a full-scale counter-offensive to liberate its territory, seeks to disorganize Russian defenses by attacking its supply routes and rear command centers.
This Friday morning, Russian authorities had announced, without explanation, that all maritime passenger traffic from Sevastopol had been suspended ‘sine die’ and until further notice.
The Russian Defense Ministry subsequently said it had prevented a Ukrainian attack by destroying a guided missile and two drones targeting Crimea.
The headquarters of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet was already the target of a ‘drone’ attack in August 2022, in which six people were injured.
Authorities of the Russian occupation of Donetsk also said today that Ukraine carried out several attacks on the region on Thursday, increasing pressure on the eastern front.
The Russian occupation leader of the Donetsk region, Denis Pushilin, believed that the situation in Bakhmut, a city devastated by a year of fighting and at the center of the Ukrainian counter-offensive, remained complicated, with the area being targeted of ‘erratic shelling’. .
In recent days, the Ukrainian military recovered two sites – Andriivka and Klichtchiivka – and even claimed to have ‘pierced’ the Russian defense line in the sector.
In the rest of Ukraine, a new Russian bombardment with more than forty cruise missiles on Thursday left three dead in Kherson, in the south of the country, and seven wounded in the capital Kiev.
The National Police today indicated that a total of seven people have been killed in the Kherson region as a result of Russian attacks in the past 24 hours.
Source: DN
