Nighttime blitz damaged Russia’s Black Sea naval stronghold: Zelenskyy
Ukrainian anti-ship missiles, jet-powered aerial drones and sea drones blitzed a major Russian naval base on the Black Sea coast in a “unique” nighttime operation, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Wednesday.
Cutting-edge drones developed by Kyiv since Russia invaded more than four years ago have repeatedly targeted Russian ships in the Black Sea, including warships and oil tankers.
Both countries have Black Sea shorelines.
Ukraine’s uncrewed fleet has succeeded in limiting the movements of Russia’s once-dominant Black Sea navy, Kyiv officials say, in one of the country’s biggest accomplishments of the war. But Ukrainian officials reckon that Russian President Vladimir Putin is bent on prosecuting the war, despite his bigger army’s slow and costly progress on the battlefield and US diplomatic efforts to find a settlement.
Putin is planning “an additional rapid mobilization of several hundred thousand Russians by the end of the year,” Zelenskyy said on social media late Tuesday, citing Ukrainian intelligence reports. The Ukrainian military “carried out a unique operation targeting the naval base in Novorossiysk - the last major stronghold of the Russian fleet in the Black Sea,” Zelenskyy said in a social media post on Wednesday.
The attack struck air defences, piers and other port infrastructure in the Krasnodar region city, he added. Krasnodar region Gov Veniamin Kondratyev said that hundreds of Ukrainian drones attacked Novorossiysk, Anapa and Gelendzhik and the Temryuk district of the region overnight.
Russian air defences downed more than 500 Ukrainian drones, the Defence Ministry in Moscow said. In Novorossiysk, an eight-year-old child was killed in the attack, and a person wounded when his house in the Temryuk region was hit later died in hospital, Kondratyev said. He added that 12 other people in the region were wounded.
