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New footage appears to show the moment Ukrainian naval drones struck a Russian patrol vessel off the coast of the annexed Crimean peninsula overnight after unsuccessful attempts to fend them off.
An indistinct night-time video seems to show the Russian vessel, the Sergei Kotov, firing on incoming Ukrainian surface drones before a bright explosion. The brief clip was posted to messaging app Telegram by a local channel covering Crimea, the peninsula to the south of mainland Ukraine that Russia has controlled since 2014. It was also reshared by Russian nationalist "z-blogger," Vladislav Pozdnyakov.
Early on Tuesday, Ukraine's military intelligence agency said a special unit of its forces had targeted the Sergei Kotov, a patrol ship belonging to Moscow's Black Sea Fleet, in an overnight attack close to the Kerch Strait in eastern Crimea.
The agency, known as the GUR, used Ukrainian-designed Magura V5 naval drones in the attack, coordinated with the Ukrainian military and Kyiv's digital transformation ministry, the GUR said in a statement.
The vessel "suffered damage to the stern, right and left sides," the GUR added in a post to social media, valuing the ship at around $65 million.
A second video — posted by the GUR — appears to depict the attack, as recorded by the naval drones. The night-vision footage seems to show the drones approaching the Russian vessel before the ship is engulfed by flames.
Newsweek could not independently verify the footage. Russia's Defense Ministry has not yet publicly commented, and has been approached for comment via email.
This is the latest in a string of Ukrainian naval drone attacks on Russia's Black Sea Fleet and Russian infrastructure in and around Crimea. Ukraine does not have a large navy, but has made impressive use of naval drones to carry out dramatic strikes on Russia's Black Sea assets that have proved deeply embarrassing to Moscow.
Russia's Black Sea operations have been "greatly complicated, if not paralyzed," Ukraine's navy said in early February. Britain's defense minister, Grant Shapps, had said in late December that Russia had lost 20 percent of its Black Sea fleet in the previous four months.
Kyiv is known to have taken out a Russian Kilo-class submarine, the Rostov-on-Don, as well as damaging a number of Moscow's landing ships. Ukrainian naval drones destroyed Russia's missile-armed corvette Ivanovets in February. In the early days of all-out war in 2022, Ukraine succeeded in sinking the Mosvka, the flagship of Russia's Black Sea fleet.
Russia has relocated some of its Black Sea assets further from Ukraine's coastline, moving east from its main base at Sevastopol to Novorossiysk, in Russia's Krasnodar region.
Russia is also thought to be establishing another Black Sea base in Abkhazia, a breakaway region internationally recognized as part of Georgia. This would move Russia's resources in the Black Sea even further away from Ukraine's reach.
Update 3/5/2024, 4:20 a.m. ET: This article was updated with additional information.
About the writer
Ellie Cook is a Newsweek security and defense reporter based in London, U.K. Her work focuses largely on the Russia-Ukraine ... Read more