Ukraine’s army claimed on Monday that it had killed the commander of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet in a strike on Crimea — a blow that, if confirmed, can be among the many most damaging suffered by the Russian Navy because the sinking of the fleet’s flagship final yr.
Citing “new details about the losses of the enemy on account of the particular operation,” Ukraine’s particular operations forces mentioned in a press release that the strike on Friday killed 34 officers, together with the fleet commander, and wounded 105 others. It didn’t identify the naval chief, however the commander of the Black Sea Fleet is Adm. Viktor Sokolov, one of the crucial senior officers in Russia’s Navy.
The assault got here throughout a gathering of Russian commanders, Ukraine’s army mentioned, and badly broken a headquarters of the Russian fleet in Sevastopol, Crimea. The chief of Ukrainian army intelligence, Kyrylo Budanov, additionally informed Voice of America on Saturday that the strike had badly wounded two senior Russian generals — Col. Gen. Aleksandr Romanchuk and Lieut. Gen. Oleg Tsekov. There was no additional phrase from both facet on their situation.
There was no quick remark from Russia’s Protection Ministry on the standing of any of its commanders, and there was no impartial verification of the claims.
In latest weeks, Ukraine has sharply elevated the tempo of strikes in Crimea, a strategically important peninsula illegally annexed by Moscow almost a decade in the past. Kyiv has used missiles and aerial and maritime drones to assault warships, a naval port, bridges and army depots.
By going after Crimea, analysts say, Ukraine is making it tougher for the Kremlin to make use of the area as a logistics hub for the territory it seized final yr in southern Ukraine, the place Russia is now battling a Ukrainian counteroffensive. Additionally it is elevating the worth that Moscow should pay to keep up management of the peninsula and use it as the bottom for a fleet that often fires missiles into Ukraine, assaults and makes an attempt to implement a blockade on Ukrainian ports.
“Any goal inside Crimea is basically honest recreation to show to the Russians they don’t have safety, they don’t management skies over Crimea, they’re susceptible to Ukrainian strikes, and Ukraine can get to them at any time when it needs,” mentioned Samuel Bendett, an analyst of Russia’s army at CNA, a suppose tank based mostly close to Washington.
Russia on Monday fired a barrage of drones and missiles on the Ukrainian port metropolis of Odesa, a hub of the grain export commerce that Ukraine has tried to keep up regardless of Russian efforts to cripple it. Ukraine’s army mentioned it had shot down many of the weapons, however officers mentioned one had hit a grain warehouse, killing two individuals, and others had broken a marine terminal and an deserted high-rise resort.
The assault on Sevastopol on Friday used a mix of missiles and exploding drones to overwhelm Russian air defenses, in accordance with Ukraine’s army. Video footage confirmed the headquarters constructing smoking as an airborne weapon plunged into it and detonated it, sending particles flying and engulfing it in a cloud of thick smoke and particles.
The Russian information company TASS featured a picture displaying a part of the constructing caved in, and an evaluation of satellite tv for pc photos earlier than and after the assault additionally confirmed that the constructing was closely broken.
If Ukraine’s claims are correct — that it knew of the high-level Russian assembly, discovered the identities of these hit and was in a position to acquire casualty counts — the statements would point out an intelligence coup in addition to a army one.
It was not clear what weapons have been used on Friday, however Ukraine has not too long ago deployed Storm Shadow cruise missiles given by Britain and almost similar SCALP cruise missiles equipped by France that reportedly can journey greater than 300 miles, far past the vary of different Western weapons utilized by Ukraine.
The strikes have uncovered flaws in Russia’s system of air defenses, in accordance with Mr. Budanov, forcing Moscow to redeploy antimissile batteries from elsewhere on the battlefield to Crimea.
“We’re depleting their air-defense missile shares as a result of these are usually not limitless,” he mentioned. “And from the political standpoint, we’re additionally demonstrating the apparent incapacity of Russian air protection methods.”
The Ukrainian assertion on Monday additionally asserted that an assault earlier this month on one of many Russian fleet’s touchdown ships, the Minsk, had killed 62 sailors — one other declare that would not be independently verified. It didn’t specify a date, however on Sept. 12, a Ukrainian assault on Sevastopol broken two navy ships, in accordance with the Russian Protection Ministry. Professional-war Russian army bloggers and the Russian information outlet Baza recognized them because the Minsk and an assault submarine.
Although it stays the paramount naval energy within the Black Sea, the Russian fleet there has suffered a number of setbacks. In April, 2022, Ukraine sank the Moskva cruiser, the fleet’s flagship vessel, with a missile assault. In August 2023, it used naval drones to break a Russian warship on the far facet of the Black Sea.
Crimea is central to the expansive territorial imaginative and prescient that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has outlined, so Moscow’s incapacity to guard it from strikes is a humiliation to the Kremlin, analysts mentioned.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine insists that his nation will retake the entire territory annexed by Russia, together with Crimea, however for years Moscow had confronted no army problem to its occupation of the peninsula. The Kremlin promoted immigration from Russia to Crimea, and the area’s balmy local weather and seashores attracted Russian vacationers, because it had for generations.
On the identical time, a regional administration put in by the Kremlin after it seized Crimea in 2014 cracked down on dissent. Worldwide human rights teams and Crimean activists say that scores of individuals, principally from the peninsula’s Tatar ethnic group, have been arrested and detained in brutal circumstances.
When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, its forces used Crimea as a jumping-off level to grab components of southern Ukraine, establishing a land bridge that connects to Russian-occupied areas farther east.
In the long term, Moscow goals to trip out the Ukrainian assaults, conscious that Ukrainian floor forces are nonetheless removed from reaching Crimea, a lot much less retaking it, in accordance with Dmitri Kuznets, an impartial analyst of the conflict who writes for Meduza, a Russian information web site.
Ukrainian shares of longer-range missiles are finite, he mentioned, including that, whereas damaging, the marketing campaign of strikes had not but reached a crucial level for Moscow.
“The purpose is to disrupt Russian logistics and management as a way to acquire a bonus on the entrance,” he mentioned. “To attain this, strikes are carried out not solely in Crimea, but in addition all through the south of Ukraine. On this sense, progress has been restricted up to now.”
Reporting was contributed by Fixed Méheut, Ivan Nechepurenko, Andrés R. Martínez, Arijeta Lajka and Neil MacFarquhar.
