🎙️ Voice is AI-generated. Inconsistencies may occur.
A Ukrainian strike on Russia's Black Sea naval fleet headquarters in Crimea has killed 34 Russian officers, including the commander of the fleet, Kyiv said on Monday.
A further 105 Russian personnel were injured in Kyiv's missile strikes, Ukraine's special forces said in a post to Telegram on Monday.
On Friday, Ukraine attacked Russia's Black Sea Fleet base in Sevastopol, reportedly using British-supplied long-range Storm Shadow cruise missiles. These were also thought to have been used in a Ukrainian strike taking out two Russian Black Sea vessels in Sevastopol earlier this month.
Russia's Defense Ministry said on Friday that its air defenses shot down five missiles over Sevastopol, but that the attack had damaged the Black Sea Fleet's headquarters. Moscow initially said one soldier had been killed, but then retracted the statement to say they were missing in action.
Newsweek has reached out to the Russian Defense Ministry for comment via email.
Following the attack, the head of Ukraine's military intelligence service, Major General Kyrylo Budanov, told Voice of America that several high-ranking Russian military personnel had been injured in the strikes, although he did not confirm reports surrounding the death of Admiral Viktor Sokolov, the commander of the Black Sea Fleet.
Sokolov was appointed in mid-July 2022, just months after Ukraine successfully sunk the Black Sea flagship, the Moskva, in April last year.
Crimea has increasingly become the focus of Ukrainian strikes in recent months. Russia annexed the peninsula in 2014, and Kyiv has repeatedly vowed to reclaim control of Crimea.
Kyiv has targeted bridges linking the peninsula, located to the south of mainland Ukraine, to Russia's internationally recognized territory and annexed parts of southern Ukraine. It has also deployed naval drones to target Black Sea Fleet facilities, launched an amphibious raid in Crimea to mark its independence day in late August, and targeted Russian S-400 air defense systems stationed on the peninsula.
Earlier this month, Ukraine launched a barrage of missile strikes on a dry dock in Sevastopol, damaging Moscow's Kilo-class Rostov-on-Don submarine—thought to be the first Russian submarine hit during the war—and the Minsk landing ship at the Ordzhonikidze shipyard.
"The only thing we can do is destroy the Black Sea Fleet and say that any new ship in the area will follow the previous ones," Andriy Zagorodnyuk, Ukraine's former defense minister who is now an adviser to the Defense Ministry, told Newsweek last week.
Update 9/25/23, 8:45 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