Crimea Before and After Photos Reveal Damage to Second Russian Ship

Ukraine's Tuesday strike on the occupied port of Feodosia may have damaged or even destroyed a second Russian naval vessel, according to new satellite images taken shortly after the cruise missile attack.

The images, published by Radio Svoboda on Tuesday, show severe damage to the Novocherkassk landing ship, which had been moored in the port of Feodosia, on the eastern Crimea coast close to the Kerch Strait Bridge that connects the peninsula to Russia.

But the Planet Labs images also show a UTS-150 training ship partially submerged alongside the Novocherkassk. Radio Svoboda noted that the vessel has been seen in the port in other satellite images since at least 2007.

Newsweek is unable to independently verify the report and has contacted the Russian Defense Ministry by email to request comment.

Tuesday's strike on Feodosia was hailed by Kyiv leaders and commanders as another serious setback for the Russian Black Sea Fleet, which has sustained significant losses since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

British Defense Minister Grant Shapps wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, that the operation "demonstrates that those who believe there's a stalemate in the Ukraine war are wrong." Shapps added that "over the past 4 months 20 percent of Russia's Black Sea Fleet has been destroyed."

Though Kyiv's progress on land has been underwhelming in recent months, it has maintained a steady drip of attacks on Russian shipping.

"We will be attacking Russian ships until they all follow the Moskva, or they run away to the eastern part of the Black Sea and stay there," former Ukrainian Defense Minister Andriy Zagorodnyuk told Newsweek earlier this year, referring to the Black Sea Fleet flagship sunk by Ukrainian anti-ship missiles in April 2022.

President Volodymyr Zelensky celebrated Tuesday's attack in a post on Telegram, writing: "I am grateful to our Air Force for the impressive replenishment of the Russian underwater Black Sea fleet with another vessel. The occupiers will not have a single peaceful place in Ukraine."

Ukrainian Air Force commander Mykola Oleshchuk, meanwhile, posted a video of an explosion at the Feodosia base and wrote: "The fleet in Russia is getting smaller and smaller! Thanks to the Air Force pilots and everyone involved for the filigree work!"

Moscow acknowledged the attack, though not the severe damage shown by satellite images of the strike site. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told journalists that Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu had informed President Vladimir Putin of "the damage to our large landing ship" in a "very detailed report."

Yuriy Ihnat, a spokesperson for the Ukrainian air force, hinted that long-range British-French Storm Shadow/SCALP cruise missiles had been used in the attack. The detonation of suspected Iranian-made Shahed kamikaze drones being stored onboard the Novocherkassk appear to have amplified the damage.

"We can see how powerful the explosion was, what the detonation was like," Ihnat told Radio Svoboda. "After that, it's very hard for a ship to survive, because this was not a rocket, this is the detonation of munitions."

Andriy Ryzhenko, a retired Ukrainian naval captain and now a strategic expert at the defense and logistics consultant company Sonata, told Newsweek that the latest attack is another success in Kyiv's "combined arms" strategy of "missiles, maritime and air drones penetrating and destroying the most valuable Russian targets in the Crimean peninsula."

The Novocherkassk, he added, has for several months been ferrying supplies between the port of Novorossiysk and Feodosia.

"The last time I believe it was a cargo of Shaheds, and maybe some other weapons needed for the Russian military in Crimea and other occupied areas of southern Ukraine," Ryzhenko said.

The landing ship appears "completely destroyed," Ryzhenko said. "I believe one of the missiles hit the bow of the ship," he explained, potentially detonating non-guided missiles traditionally used to saturate a landing zone ahead of an amphibious assault.

Astra, an independent Russian news Telegram channel, reported that dozens of Russian sailors are wounded or missing.

"They were in the process of unloading the ship," Ivan Stupak, a former officer in the Security Service of Ukraine and now an adviser to the Ukrainian parliament's national security, defense and intelligence committee, told Newsweek of the strike.

"The missile arrived at the same exact time and destroyed a lot of the ship's crew, and other people who were around the ship. The number of casualties could rise."

Ryzhenko concurred: "I think probably most of the crew were also killed," he said. "In confined waters, use of any medium or bigger-sized vessel is very dangerous....It's easy to find, identify and destroy these big ships."

Update 12/27/23, 9 a.m. ET: This article has been updated with comments from Andriy Ryzhenko and Ivan Stupak.

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