A suspected overnight Ukrainian missile and drone attack on the Crimean port of Sevastopol has reportedly damaged a landing ship and submarine belonging to the Russian Black Sea Fleet, in what appears to be the latest blow inflicted by Kyiv against Moscow’s navy.
The Russian state-run Tass news agency reported that the overnight attack injured 24 people in Sevastopol, with Moscow-installed city governor Mikhail Razvozhaev blaming a “missile attack.” Photos and videos of the port showed a series of explosions and fires raging around the docks. The first strikes were reported at around 3 a.m. local time. Tass reported witnesses hearing around 10 explosions.
The Russian Defense Ministry said Sevastopol was attacked by three naval drones and 10 cruise missiles. In a statement, the ministry said that all unmanned aerial vehicles were destroyed, along with seven cruise missiles. The target, it added, was the S. Ordzhonikidze ship repair plant.
Razvozhaev posted a photo from the scene appearing to show the side of a Ropucha-class large landing ship that sustained damage, The New York Times reported. The Russian Baza news outlet reported that the damaged landing ship was the Minsk, and that the Kilo-class Rostov-on-Don attack submarine was also hit.
Video supposedly of the strike and aftermath (with the caveat that sometimes footage from similar strikes gets reused, and the guy’s voice at the beginning sounds strangely familiar).
Suchomimus also has a video:
The fire on the Minsk seems so extensive that the ship is likely gutted.
The Rostov-on-Don submarine was commissioned in December 2014.
If it suffered a direct hit, it’s likely out of commission for the indefinite future.
“The dry dock will likely be out of commission for a while. These are pretty sturdy things, so I don’t think it will be fully destroyed. But the one here is now clogged with two destroyed or damaged ships, not to mention damage to various bits of machinery.” But don’t forget that Russia managed to lose a floating dry dock in Murmansk when it sank in 2018.
This was one of three military dry docks in Sevastopol. Russia has three civilian dry docks in Novorossiysk (which may or may not be able to handle military ships) and one in Rostov-on-Don, currently occupied by the damaged Sig oil tanker. They’re used for regular maintenance in addition to repair.
On the Kilo-class submarine: “Russia has just five active in the Black Sea. These are important targets, as Russia uses these to launch Kalibr missiles, so one of these being destroyed does impact Russia’s capabilities to launch strikes over the Black Sea.”
As Suchomimus notes, Russia seems to be losing a naval war to a country without a navy…
Busy Saturday, so enjoy a couple of Suchomimus videos about a Crimean oil refinery that Ukrainian drones made blow up real good.
Here’s footage of the refinery burning bright in the forests of the night:
“This video is showing a burning oil refinery in Depot at Kozaka Bay near Sevastopol Harbor in Crimea.”
“This took place at 4:30 AM, and it was said to be a UAV. Given the size of a blaze I would say it seems that multiple UAVs were used here.” Maybe. Or maybe it’s just that refined petroleum products are naturally very sploady and Russian safety standards and precautions suck harder than Kamala Harris.
And follow-up footage of the fire mostly controlled, but showing two oil storage tanks totally destroyed and several others damaged:
“This oil storage facility is one which supplied the Black Sea Fleet, so we’re going to have to wait and see if it’s loss will have an impact on operations from there.”
It remains an open question how much Russia has actually used its Black Sea Fleet since the sinking of Moskva over a year ago. Maybe I just haven’t been paying attention, or maybe not much news leaks out, but we don’t hear a lot about the black Sea Fleet playing a significant role in the conflict beyond occasionally participating in the missile wave attacks against Ukrainian civilian infrastructure.
Also, one wonders how much gasoline and diesel is flowing into Crimea without the Kerch Strait Bridge back at full rail capacity. I see only one other oil refinery in all of Crimea, a tiny one near Voinka Boihka that could just be a storage facility. And given the lack of visible cars and trucks in Google map images, it may not even be active.
All the more reason to believe that a counterattack taking Melitopol would make Russian resupply of troops in Crimea exceptionally difficult…
Commenter Greg The Class Traitor asked about this on another thread, so I thought I would throw this Anders Puck Nielsen video up with a bit of context.
Basically Ukraine managed to hit (but not sink) some Russian warships in Sevastopol harbor with some waterborne drones, and Putin threw a hissy fit, declaring the Ukrainian grain export deal was off. Turkey promptly went “No it isn’t” and said exports would continue with Turkish flags on the grain ships in question, causing Russia to back down and rejoin the deal pretty much immediately.
Historically, there’s no love lost between Turkey and Russia. (Honestly, you could swap out any other of either of those two country’s neighbors in that sentence, and it would still be true.) The fact that there were ten different Russo-Turkish wars (plus the Crimean War and World War I) should give you an inkling of how deep and bitter that enmity extends. That’s one of the factors that made NATO such a useful ally against the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Even today, Russia and Turkey are fighting a quasi-proxy war between Russian-backed Armenia and Turkish-backed Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh, and Russia is on the losing end there as well.
Let’s look at Russia’s backdown over the grain deal.
Takeaways:
“It looks like a diplomatic defeat in a stand-off with Turkey, and it shows that Russia is essentially unable to control the maritime domain in the Black Sea.”
“Russia was clearly very upset about the attack. It was a big deal in the Russian media, and they put a lot of effort into portraying it as a terrorist attack. And just to be clear, when there is a war going on, it is not terrorism to attack the opponent’s military.” This is clearly a “Duh!” point, but one worth spelling out given the vast swarms of pro-Russian bots who argue otherwise.
“The deal was made such that it had a duration of 120 days, so it was up for renewal in November…For quite a while is has seemed that Russia has been unhappy about the grain deal. I don’t think they had expected that it would be such a big success.”
“As I am recording this we are up to 477 shipments and more than 10 million tons of cargo. That’s a lot. I don’t think the Russians had expected Ukraine to be able to make a safe corridor that quickly.”
“If we remember how the war was going back in July, then Russia was still on the offensive. People were still talking about Russia closing the land corridor to Transnistria and maybe taking Odessa. So from a Russian perspective the idea might well have been that the deal would never work. Because it was going to take months for Ukraine to make a safe corridor, and before that time, Ukraine would have lost the access to the ports.”
“But what happened was that the grain deal did become a success. Ukraine has made a lot of money from exporting its agricultural products, and it has reduced the prices of food on the global markets.”
“What this grain does is that it reduces the prices on the global market, so that people in the third world can also afford to buy food. And then it helps the economy because it reduces inflation. But for Russia right now it is a point to have a big economic crisis in the West, and the Ukrainian economy is supposed to be terrible.”
“Turkey was not going to accept that the deal would fall on the ground. So they made it clear that the grain shipments were going to continue, and that they were going to provide the ships to do it, if necessary. And that gave Russia the challenge that if they withdrew from the deal, but it didn’t have any consequences, then it would be embarrassing. Because it would demonstrate that Russia is unable to control the events.”
“The Russian navy can’t actually operate with surface warships close to the Ukrainian coastline, because Ukraine has land based anti-ship missiles, so it would be really hard to interdict the grain traffic. And using long-distance air strikes or submarine attacks on UN cargo ships that are transporting grain to the world to avoid a food crisis…it would turn everybody against Russia. It’s just impossible to explain.”
“Maybe it could even lead to a military confrontation with Turkish warships that were protecting the shipments. So in other words, Erdogan called Putin’s bluff.”
“What this shows is basically two things. It shows that the relationship between Turkey and Russia, it now that Turkey that has the stronger position. It is now Erdogan that tells Putin how things will be. And then it shows that the Russian Black Sea Fleet can’t enforce a blockade on Ukrainian harbors. And if they can’t do that, then I will say that it is getting more and more difficult to see what the role of the Russian navy actually is in this war.”
Plus, if Russia had actually attacked Turkish ships, that would probably lead directly to a military conflict with NATO. And while I’m sure that before Russo-Ukrainian War, there were many Russian ultranationalists who loudly declared that Russia could win a war against NATO, Russian military performance has been so lousy that only the most hopelessly self-deluded could believe that now.
(By the way, my Internet was restored Friday. It turns out three people on my block were affected, so it was a narrowspread outage, evidently because the “traps” were too old to handle a recent network upgrade. I’ll try to do the LinkSwarm on Sunday, if I have time.)
Previous stories on Ukraine hitting Russian military bases in Crimea have focused on the possibility of long-range missile strikes. As those strikes have continued, it’s now proven that some have been carried out by drone, and others appear to be the work of Ukrainian special forces or resistance fighters hitting the Russian deep behind the front lines.
None of these is good news for Russia.
Ukraine used a drone to hit the headquarters of the Black Sea fleet in Sevastopol:
Some takeaways:
It was a hit, not a drone shoot-down.
“The new Black Sea commander was there. There are some reports saying it’s his first day in office. So, welcome to the new job, Chuck.”
The author thinks that a number of Ukrainian special forces might be operating drone from a point inside Crimea.
He says another possibility is it’s controlled via repeaters across the Black Sea, but I don’t see why you couldn’t also control it via satlink from orbit.
Ukrainian forces also hit the nearby Belbek Airbase:
More targeted Russian military infrastructure:
The Ukrainians are hitting Russian facilities hard today
• Explosion at munitions depot, Timonovo, Belgorod • Explosion at Stary Oskol Airfield, Belgorod • Explosions in Nova Kakhovka, Kherson • Explosions at Belbek airport, Crimea • Air defence active near Kerch, Crimea pic.twitter.com/kzNleiN2rU
— Louis 🇬🇧 🇪🇺 〓〓 💙 Defend the right to vote (@LouisHenwood) August 18, 2022
Those attacks at Timonovo and Stary Oskol Airfield happened in Russia proper, not occupied Ukraine.
HOLY HIMARS WHAT IS GOING ON? Belgorod local telegram channels report a new explosion at the airfield in Stary Oskol. More than 150 km from front line. Presumably the video below is from there –#Ukraine#Russiapic.twitter.com/35xQAZrpK7
— Special Kherson Cat 🐈🇺🇦 (@bayraktar_1love) August 18, 2022
The Wall Street Journal has a Crimea 101 explainer up:
Russia used Crimea as a huge staging area for the southern part of the invasion.
Right now Ukraine is seeking to degrade Russian forces rather than battle them directly. “A thousand stings from a bee.”
Airfield strikes have forced Russia to move planes out of Crimea.
Despite air superiority, Russia clearly doesn’t have the manpower, organization and equipment to protect their rear echelon from ongoing supply and infrastructure attacks. This exacerbates Russia’s well-documented logistics problems, especially given the Russian doctrinal preference for smaller numbers of support personnel maintaining fewer, larger supply depots.
All that would tend to argue against Russia gaining much further territory in what remains of the summer.