Russia’s Defense Ministry claimed Friday that its ships had “repelled an attack” by Ukrainian unmanned boats threatening a naval base, according to state media, before Kyiv released a video apparently showing the attack succeeding.
“Tonight, the Armed Forces of Ukraine, using two crewless boats, attempted to attack the Novorossiysk naval base,” a source in the ministry told the TASS news agency, referring to the Black Sea installation in southern Russia. “In the course of repelling the attack, crewless boats were visually detected and destroyed by fire from the standard weapons of Russian ships guarding the outer raid of the naval base.”
Hours later, Kyiv came out with a different version of events. A Ukrainian official told Interfax that the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) and the Ukrainian Navy had conducted the operation and that a large Russian landing ship named Olenegorsky Gornyak had been damaged. The source said that as a result of the attack, the ship “suffered a serious hole and is currently unable to perform its combat tasks.” “All Russian statements about the ‘attack being repulsed’ are fake,” they added.
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To bolster the Ukrainian version of events, a video purportedly showing footage from a camera on board one of the surface drones was also released. “The video shows how a surface drone of the SBU, saturated with 450 kilograms of TNT, attacks an enemy ship with about 100 crew members on board,” the source said.
The black-and-white recording appears to show the bow of some type of vessel as the watercraft sails toward the port side of a large ship. The Ukrainian vessel travels closer and closer to the ship until the footage cuts to static—presumably at the point of impact.
On Friday morning, multiple videos began circulating on social media appearing to show the same ship targeted in the attack footage being towed. The ship is listing heavily to its port side as it’s towed across the water.
Given Russia’s denial that the drone attack had succeeded, it’s not clear if there were any casualties in the incident. Veniamin Kondratiev, the governor of the Krasnodar region where the naval base is located, said no one had been hurt, according to The Associated Press.
But the assault was serious enough for the Caspian Pipeline Consortium, which operates a pipeline terminal in the port of Novorossiysk, to issue a “temporary ban” on all ship movement in the area. The order was later lifted. The civilian port handles 2 percent of all of the world’s oil supply as well as grain exports, according to Reuters.
Crimea, which is just across the water from Novorossiysk, was similarly attacked with drones early Friday, according to Russia’s Defense Ministry. It claimed to have taken out 13 drones, with 10 shot down and three jammed.
The latest volley of attacks inside Russia and occupied Crimea come after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warned that the conflict would return to the aggressors’ homeland. “The war is gradually returning to Russian territory,” he said in a video message over the weekend. Zelesnky called the development an “inevitable, natural, and absolutely fair process.”
Read it at Interfax Ukraine
