The Novocherkassk landing ship, which entered service in 1987, is one of the crown jewels of the Russian Black Sea Fleet. While in the port of Feodosia, on the Crimean peninsula, she was hit by a Ukrainian attack in the early hours of Tuesday morning. Kyiv maintains that she has destroyed it, but Russia says it repulsed the attack and that the battle left only one dead and two wounded. Furthermore, the Russian Ministry of Defense yesterday considered the Ukrainian counteroffensive aborted.
The attack occurred a day after Moscow announced the total seizure of the Marinka bastion in the Donbass, in what appears to be Kyiv's response to the largest Russian victory since last May, when it captured Bakhmut.
Russian social networks and media yesterday published images of a huge explosion and a fireball in the port of Feodosia, a city of 66,000 inhabitants southeast of Crimea
The head of the Ukrainian air forces, Lieutenant General Mikola Oleschuk, took responsibility for the attack on Telegram. And he claimed that Novocherkassk had been destroyed. “The fleet in Russia is getting smaller and smaller!” he shouted in his message. “This time, the large landing ship Novocherkassk follows the flagship of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, the ‘Moskva’, which was sunk in April 2022,” he added.
A first attempted attack against Novocherkassk already occurred on March 24, 2022, when Berdiansk was located, in the Zaporizhia region. “Today it has been finished,” the Ukrainian Defense Forces also celebrated on Telegram.
Ukraine suspects that the ship was carrying Iranian Shahed drones, which Moscow uses in the war. The spokesman for the Ukrainian Air Force, Yuri Ignat, said on Radio Liberty that the large explosion observed in Feodosia was due to the ship carrying ammunition and military equipment, but did not specify whether the aforementioned drones were among them. “In one photo, only a skeleton remained of this ship, everything that was there was burned to the ground,” he said.
The president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, also participated in the enthusiasm, and on Telegram wrote ironically: “Congratulations to our Armed Forces for adding another ship to the Russian Black Sea submarine fleet.”
The Russian version is different. The Russian Defense Ministry reported that the Novocherkassk had suffered damage during the successful repulsion of an attack on Feodosia. During the battle, “air defense systems destroyed two Ukrainian Sukhoi Su-24 fighter jets” that launched guided missiles, the ministry added. Kyiv later denied having lost those fighters.
Sergei Aksionov, Russian governor of Crimea, a territory that Russia annexed in 2014, said that one person was killed and two others were injured. According to him, there was damage to buildings, but the transport infrastructure was functioning normally.
The biggest blow to Russian forces in less than a week leaves strange signs of enthusiasm in Kyiv, whose forces are repositioning themselves on the defensive at various points on the front after the summer counteroffensive did not bear the expected results.
On Monday, December 25, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu met with the head of the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin, and informed him that Russian troops have full control of Marinka, five kilometers from the city of Donetsk. , in eastern Ukraine.
Márinka had 10,000 inhabitants before the conflict. It is now an important foothold for the advance of Russian troops towards Avdivka, where the bloodiest battle of the war is currently being fought. The capture of the bastion will give “new opportunities for future actions in that direction,” Shoigu said.
And yesterday, in a meeting with the Army's senior staff, he assured that his troops have deactivated the Ukrainian counteroffensive. According to Shoigu, in 2023 one of the objectives was “to abort the counteroffensive so announced by Ukraine and its NATO partners. The mission has been successfully accomplished,” and he stated that the Russian Army is advancing in all sectors of the front.
The commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian Army, Valeri Zaluzhni, acknowledged yesterday that his troops have withdrawn to the outskirts of Márinka, according to the agencies. “We protect every piece of our land, but if enemy projectiles begin to litter this narrow piece with stones, dirt and our soldiers, then the lives of our soldiers are more important. War, unfortunately, is like that,” he said at a press conference in Kyiv.
