The Russian-appointed head of Crimea said fragments of the missile it shot down hit a dry dock and there were no casualties.
Ukraine’s armed forces said they struck naval and port infrastructure at a shipyard in the port city of Kerch on the eastern coast of Russian-occupied Crimea.
Since launching its counteroffensive against Moscow’s forces this summer, Kiev has intensified its attacks on the Black Sea peninsula that Russia captured in 2014.
The peninsula’s Russian-appointed president said on Saturday that fragments of the downed missile hit a dry dock and there were no casualties.
The Strategic Communications Department of the Ukrainian Armed Forces said in a post on the Telegram application that Ukraine “carried out successful strikes on the maritime and port infrastructure of the “Zaliv” factory in the temporarily occupied city of Kerch,” without providing further details.
“I hope another ship has followed the Moskva!” Mykola Oleshchuk, commander of the Ukrainian Air Force, said in a post on Telegram, referring to the Russian Black Sea Fleet ship that was sunk by Ukrainian missiles on April 14, 2022.
Oleschuk said the cruise missiles hit the infrastructure at Zaliv – now called BE Butoma – “where one of the Russian Navy’s newest ships, the Kalibr cruise missile carrier, is based.” He said he was “awaiting official confirmation of the results.”
Sergei Aksyonov, the Russian-appointed governor of Crimea, said air defense systems were operating around the Kerch shipyard named after PE Potoma.
“Fragments of the dropped missiles fell on the territory of one of the dry docks,” Aksyonov said in a post on Telegram. “There were no injuries.”
Meanwhile, Russian news agencies quoted the Russian Defense Ministry as confirming that Ukraine hit the Kerch shipyard with 15 cruise missiles, damaging one ship. It added that air defense systems destroyed 13 missiles launched by Ukraine.
Reuters and Agence France-Presse news agencies said that neither the Russian and Ukrainian statements nor the social media posts could be verified, including videos of missile activity as well as fire and smoke that the posts said were rising from the same location mentioned by the Ukrainian military.
Military analyst and journalist Andrei Tsaplenko said in a post on Telegram that one of the newest Russian ships, a small cruise missile carrier that launched in 2021, the Askold, was damaged in the attack, according to what he described as preliminary information.
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