Kyiv, Ukraine
CNN
—
Ukrainian sea drones attacked a major naval base in Russia on Friday, leaving a damaged Russian warship listing in the Black Sea in a brazen strike carried out hundreds of miles from Ukrainian-held territory.
Dramatic social media videos showed the vessel, an amphibious Russian landing ship, tilting badly and sitting very low in the water as it was being towed near the base at Novorossiysk, Russia’s largest port.
The incident comes against the backdrop of rising tensions in the Black Sea and stepped up Ukrainian strikes against targets across Russia after President Volodymr Zelensky pledged to “return” the war to Russian territory.
A Ukrainian source told CNN that a sea drone carrying nearly 1,000 pounds of TNT had hit the ship, and claimed there were about 100 Russian servicemen aboard.
“A big navy ship, [the] Olenogorsky Gornyak, was hit,” the source told CNN. “As the result of the attack, the Russian ship has received serious damage and is not able to fulfill its duties.”
CNN was provided with footage showing an unmanned sea drone approaching a ship that appears to match the identity of the one later seen listing in the port of Novorossiysk. The 36-second video, shot from the sea drone, shows it approaching a ship at night. The video ends just as the drone reaches its target.
The Ukrainian source said the operation was carried out jointly by the Security Service of Ukraine and the Ukrainian Navy.
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A Russian-appointed official said later on Friday that three Ukrainian sea drones had also been destroyed near the Kerch Strait and the area leading to the Crimean bridge.
The drones damaged a civilian Russian tanker, injuring some crew members, according to Vladimir Rogov, an official with the Zaporizhzhia military-civilian administration. However, Russia’s Federal Agency for Marine and River Transport said in a statement on Telegram that there were no casualties among the 11 crew.
A Ukraine Security Service source told CNN the hit on the Russian oil tanker, the SIG, was carried out in a joint operation with the Navy and that it involved a sea drone with 450kg of TNT. The source said the SIG had been “transporting fuel for the Russian military.”
CNN has not been able to independently verify the claims.
SIG is one of the biggest Russian oil tankers. It was built in 2014 and has 5,000-ton capacity.
The strike at Novorossiysk was the latest demonstration of Kyiv’s ambitious push to develop long-range unmanned attack vehicles at sea and in the air. The drone that hit the ship would have had to travel several hundred miles to reach the port, whether launched from Ukrainian-controlled territory or from somewhere in the Black Sea.
Novorossiysk, near the Russian city of Krasnodar, is Russia’s largest port by volume of cargo handled and is a base for Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. It is ice-free year-round and has nearly 100 berths, and handles oil and gas exports as well as agricultural exports.
The Olenengorsky Gornyak was one of three Ropucha-class ships that entered the Black Sea weeks before the Russian invasion in February 2022, when a sea-borne assault on the coast around Odesa seemed a likely part of Moscow’s strategy.
The Russians’ failure to advance further west on land in the early days of the invasion, combined with the improvement in Ukrainian defenses since then, has made such an operation highly unlikely and the ship, which is nearly 50 years old, would not have had a key role in the Russian navy’s current Black Sea plans.
But the Ukrainians’ ability to reach Novorossiysk serves notice that Russian surface ships and port infrastructure in the Black Sea are vulnerable to these fast and relatively stealthy weapons, especially with combat payloads of the size that struck the ship.
A Russian military blogger who goes by the name Rybar later reported that one of the Olenengorsky…
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