Ukraine Investigating After 'Dead' Russian Admiral Seen at Press Conference

Ukrainian officials said on Tuesday that they are investigating after Russian Admiral Viktor Sokolov appeared in a video meeting after purportedly being killed by a missile strike.

Ukraine's Special Operations Forces reported on Monday that it had carried out a successful strike against the headquarters of the Russian Navy's Black Sea fleet in Crimea. The strike, the agency noted, resulted in 105 injuries and killed 34 Russian military officers, including Sokolov, the commander of the fleet and a high-value target for Ukraine.

Russia's own statements about the incident did not confirm Sokolov's death, saying only that the building in Sevastopol had been damaged and that one officer had been killed, which was later retracted and corrected as "missing in action."

On Tuesday, Russia seemed to further counter Ukraine's claims about Sokolov when its Defense Ministry shared an image of a meeting to Telegram featuring the supposedly deceased admiral. It came shortly after Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters that he did not have information "about the alleged death of Black Sea Fleet Commander Sokolov."

Ukraine's Special Operations Forces have begun an investigation into the discrepancy, collecting and attempting to clarify data regarding the casualties from Monday's missile strike, Pravda reported.

"As you know, 34 officers were killed as a result of a missile attack on the headquarters of the Black Sea Fleet of the Russian Federation," the agency said. "Available sources claim that the commander of the Black Sea Fleet of the Russian Federation is among the dead. Many have not yet been identified due to the disparity of body fragments.

The statement continued: "Since the Russians were urgently forced to publish an answer with an apparently alive Sokolov, our units are clarifying the information. This happens within the framework of the procedure for collecting data on the results of the operation."

After releasing the photo of the meeting that Sokolov had purportedly attended, Russian officials later shared a video. A report from Pravda noted certain suspicious aspects of the video, including the fact that Sokolov appeared "completely motionless on the screen." After a five-second splice in the video, he appeared to be wearing glasses and remained seemingly motionless.

Rajan Menon, a European defense expert with the Defense Priorities think-tank, previously spoke to Newsweek about how significant Sokolov's death would be if true.

"If the death of Admiral Sokolov is confirmed, it's noteworthy in at least two respects," Menon said. "First, Russia has already lost a significant number of officers in this war and this latest loss therefore represents part of a trend: Ukrainian press reports claim that 33 other officers died along with him on September 22. That's a big loss in a single day.

He continued: "Second, and more importantly, in the days prior to the September 22 Ukrainian attack on Sevastopol that allegedly killed Sokolov, Ukraine had launched several attacks on Crimean military targets. That makes the decision to concentrate so many senior officers in one place on that peninsula baffling, even if meeting among them was essential and urgent. It's not as if the risk was hard to anticipate."