Ukraine: Stabbings against Russian navy in Sevastopol

There is no longer a Ukrainian navy - at least not to any significant extent in terms of tonnage or flagstaff. Nevertheless, its opponent, the navy of the Russian Federation, is not invulnerable, as the head of the German navy was quick to point out. The Ukrainian forces are currently pooling all their resources, from Western arms supplies to drones built in garages and basements to sabotage forces on the ground, in order to reach the vulnerable areas of the Russian navy. With their pinpricks, they not only want to ban floating material from deployment, but also limit the entire operational capability of the Black Sea Fleet. If you can't hit a submarine at sea, you can do it quite well in dry dock: during the attacks on the naval headquarters led by special forces in Sevastopol on 16 and 22 September, the conventional KILO-class submarine ROSTOV AM DON, which was in dry dock, was also targeted and hit by an English Strom Shadow cruise missile. According to media reports, the thermal image of the boat in the dock first had to be captured and transmitted to mission control so that the cruise missile could recognise its target.

Rostov-on-Don in dry dock, photo: @UAWeapons

Prior to this, the Russian-occupied oil drilling platforms were reclaimed and the enemy airspace surveillance installed there was switched off so that Ukrainian weapons had free flight paths. In addition to the command centre, a ROPUCHA-class landing craft and the aforementioned submarine and dry dock, another ship - possibly the heavily armed BORA-class missile ship SAMUM (Project 1239) - was also hit. After this second attack on Sevastopol at the latest, Russia withdrew the high-value units (the frigates ADMIRAL ESSEN and MAKAROV, three submarines and five landing ships) from the line of fire and moved most of them to Novorossiysk. Satellite images show increasingly deserted harbour areas in the Crimean metropolis. A picture is worth a thousand words.