A Ukrainian navy captain claimed Russia has only one missile ship left in the Black Sea.
He said that most of the Black Sea Fleet had relocated after a series of Ukrainian strikes.
A senior UK Royal Navy officer said that 25% of Russia’s Black Sea warships had been sunk or damaged.
A Ukrainian commander has said that Russia only has one “loser” missile ship left in the Black Sea after a series of successful attacks.
“Most of the combat units, if you take the carriers of cruise missiles, have actually all been relocated, except for one loser who has not yet launched a single missile,” Captain Dmytro Pletenchuk told Ukrainian TV.
He said that the lone ship remaining in Crimea is Russia’s Cyclone warship, a Karakurt-class corvette.
Pletenchuk noted that the Black Sea Fleet was once considered Russia’s main force in Crimea but had almost entirely been chased away and relocated.
A Ukrainian sea drone slams into a Russian warship in Novorossiysk on August 4, 2023.Pravda Gerashchenko
Ukraine has been successfully using missiles and drones to strike ships at Sevastopol, Russia’s major Black Sea port in Crimea.
A senior UK Royal Navy officer said last month that 25% of Russia’s vessels in the Black Sea had been sunk or damaged.
Last weekend, Ukraine carried out its latest attacks on the Russian fleet at Sevastopol, bombarding it with missiles that struck four ships.
Ukraine’s navy said it struck two of Russia’s large landing ships, the Yamal and the Azov, as well as the spy ship Ivan Khurs and the Konstantin Olshansky large landing ship.
The latter ship was seized from Ukraine in 2014 when Russia annexed the Crimean peninsula.
The UK’s defense minister said on March 25, after the latest Ukrainian attack, that the Black Sea Fleet was “functionally inactive.”
In a further intelligence update on March 31, the UK defense ministry said that four Russian barges had been identified in recent imagery as being positioned at the entrance to the Black Sea Fleet facility at Novorossiysk.
The department noted this was an effort to boost the defenses of the port against attacks from Ukrainian Uncrewed Surface Vessels (USVs), which are remotely operated vessels that are packed with explosives and used to strike Russian ships.
The UK department said that some of the Black Sea’s most valuable assets had taken refuge Novorossiysk port in the eastern Black Sea after the regular attacks on their traditional homeport of Sevastopol.
Russia’s Adm. Viktor Sokolov, the former Commander of the Black Sea Fleet, was reported to have been fired after a string of successful Ukrainian attacks.
The UK defense department noted that his successor, Vice Adm. Sergei Pinchuk, has likely taken preventive measures to improve the survival chances of Russian vessels.
Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba has called on India to reconsider its traditionally close relationship with Russia during a visit to New Delhi.
“The co-operation between India and Russia is largely based on the Soviet legacy,” Kuleba told Britain’s Financial Times newspaper in comments from the Indian capital on Friday. “But this is not the legacy that will be kept for centuries; it is a legacy that is evaporating.”
New Delhi has taken a neutral stance on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, does not support Western sanctions against Moscow and repeatedly promotes conflict resolution through dialogue. The world’s most populous country with 1.4 billion inhabitants maintains good relations with Western nations and Russia.
Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, India has increased its imports of cheap oil from Russia – and is one of its largest customers. The country has also been purchasing a large proportion of its military equipment from Russia for a long time. However, India is increasingly trying to reduce its dependency in this respect, importing more from other countries or producing domestically.
Kuleba also told the Financial Times that India should be concerned about the closer relations between Russia and China. India has had extremely strained relations with neighbouring China since a deadly clash on their shared and heavily militarized border in the Himalayan mountains in 2020.
Kuleba also expressed interest in more trade between Ukraine and India. His country was looking to import heavy machinery from India, for example, he said.
European Union member states on Wednesday agreed to tighten restrictions on agricultural imports from Ukraine, following months of angry protests by EU farmers against what they say is unfair competition.
According to diplomats, the new compromise stipulates that fewer goods than originally planned will be allowed to be sold duty-free into the EU. The products affected include eggs, poultry, sugar and maize.
Goods affected by the restrictions will only be allowed to be imported into the EU duty free up to a certain amount. When this amount is reached, tariffs will apply again.
The duty-free caps are based on average imports from Ukraine during an earlier reference period.
The new agreement effectively lowers the caps by including the latter half of 2021, when imports were lower than they would later become. France wanted to include the whole of 2021, which would have lowered the averages even further.
In a statement on Thursday, farmers’ lobby group Copa-Cogeca called the deal a “half-response” that didn’t go far enough. It called for automatic tariffs on wheat and barley in addition to lower quantities of goods like eggs, poultry and sugar that can enter the EU duty-free.
France and Poland had unsuccessfully sought to have wheat included in the list of Ukrainian farm products subject to the caps.
DILEMMA: HELPING UKRAINE WITHOUT HURTING EU FARMERS
Since the start of 2024, farmers across Europe have protested against rising costs, the EU’s environmental policy, and cheap food imports, including those from Ukraine. They returned to Brussels with their tractors on Tuesday.
EU leaders seek to restore balance between supporting Ukraine’s economy and protecting EU agricultural producers. EU agricultural ministers met in Brussels on Tuesday to try to appease the farmers’ anger by signing off on measures to loosen conditions for access to subsidies from the bloc’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP).
“We see how the confidence of Czech and European farmers in the European Union has been shaken, and my concern is to be able to restore this confidence,” the Czech Agriculture Minister Marek Výborný told reporters.
The tighter import rules are the latest in a string of concessions to European farmers. They come less than three months before elections to the European Parliament. Surveys predict the vote will result in a surge of support for far-right parties that are using farmers’ discontent as part of their campaigning.
The changes agreed on Wednesday are part of a one-year extension – from June – of a temporary decision to remove tariffs on Ukrainian goods, in order to help the country’s war-battered economy.
The compromise among member states’ still needs the approval of the European Parliament before it can take effect. If the extension is not in place by June 5, then the prewar tarrifs on Ukrainian goods will be automatically reintroduced.
The European Commission also wants to impose tariffs on Russian grain imports to the bloc. Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said the EU did not want Russia to earn grain revenue from the bloc, or to “influence” the EU’s market.
POLISH BLOCKADE STRAINS TIES WITH UKRAINE
Polish farmers have been blocking Ukrainian agricultural goods coming over the border as they fear being undercut by cheaper produce.
Poland and Ukraine were closer to resolving a conflict over farm imports, Warsaw said Wednesday, on the eve of bilateral talks on the issue. “We can say there’s been a certain rapprochement between the respective positions,” Poland’s Agriculture Minister Czesław Siekierski told AFP. Nevertheless, “each is fighting for himself,” he said.
The border blockades and the dispute have strained ties between the neighbours, even as Poland has shown staunch support for Ukraine since the Russian invasion. Warsaw has been calling for an EU ceiling on Ukrainian imports, after having imposed one unilaterally last year.
The Danish minister for agriculture, Jacob Jensen, said: “There are things in this world that are more important than anything else. On the security and foreign policy front, we must support Ukraine as much as we possibly can.”
He added that “we do this militarily, but we must also do it in terms of ensuring that Denmark and the EU do not put obstacles in the way of them being able to sell their goods and support the economy.” Jensen acknowledged that there may be local markets, such as Poland, that are disproportionately affected by loosening trade restrictions with Ukraine.
The content of this article is based on reporting by AFP, ANSA, BTA, CTK, dpa, Ritzau, STA as part of the European Newsroom (enr) project.
Zelenskyy says Ukrainian forces have almost no artillery remaining in fight against Russia – CBS News
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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says he is expecting a counteroffensive this spring, and is calling on help from allies for more weapons to fight Russia’s invasion. CBS News senior foreign correspondent Charlie D’Agata has more from his exclusive interview with the Ukrainian president.
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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy warns Putin’s war could spread to NATO territory – CBS News
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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy tells CBS News’ Charlie D’Agata in an exclusive interview that, without more U.S. help “now,” Ukraine won’t be able to stop Vladimir Putin from pushing his war onto NATO soil.
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WARSAW, Poland (AP) — Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal was in Poland on Thursday for talks with his counterpart Donald Tusk to address Polish and western European farmers’ demands that regulations be applied to the cheap Ukrainian food imports that they say are undercutting their livelihoods.
Farmers in many countries have been staging vehement protests against the imports and tensions have grown between Kyiv and its staunch ally Warsaw over the tax-free inflow of Ukraine’s farm produce.
Tusk has suggested that Poland, a NATO member and European Union country bordering Ukraine, will seek quotas on the imports during the talks. He has also suggested boosting imports to needy countries.
The EU has opened its doors wide to Ukrainian farm produce to help the country’s exports after Russia’s 2022 invasion cut many traditional routes.
However, EU lawmakers recently agreed that quotas could be reintroduced on some Ukrainian foods to address the European farmers’ complaints.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has spoken of alleged Ukrainian involvement in the Moscow concert hall attack on Friday evening that killed more than 100 people.
Referring to four of the eleven men arrested in connection with the concert hall attack, Putin said in an address to the nation broadcast on Russian state television on Saturday afternoon that there was a clear “Ukrainian trail.”
“They tried to hide and moved towards Ukraine, where a window had been prepared for them to cross the border,” Putin said.
Russia’s FSB domestic intelligence service had previously reported arrests in the southern Bryansk region, which borders on Ukraine.
More than two years into its defence against a full-scale Russian invasion, Ukraine emphatically rejected rumours of its involvement in the attack on the outskirts of Moscow.
The Islamic State terrorist militia also issued a message claiming responsibility for the attack, which some experts consider to be genuine.
Russian propagandists were quick to claim that Ukraine was behind the bloodshed, but did not provide any proof of this.
According to the authorities, more than 100 people were killed in the assault with small arms and explosives on Friday evening at the Crocus City Hall concert and event venue.
Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks during his address, the day after a terror attack on the Crocus City Hall in Krasnogorsk. -/Kremlin/dpa
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Ukrainian drones hit a Russian tanker in the Black Sea near Crimea, according to Russian officials and video circulating on social media.
The late Friday night strike was the second sea attack involving drones in one day, after Ukraine struck a major Russian port earlier Friday.
As Kyiv’s naval capabilities grow, the Black Sea is becoming an increasingly important battleground in the war.
Three weeks ago, Moscow withdrew from a key export agreement that allowed Ukraine to ship millions of tons of grain across the Black Sea for sale on world markets. In the wake of that withdrawal, Russia carried out repeated strikes on Ukrainian ports, including Odesa.
An official with Ukraine’s Security Service confirmed to The Associated Press that the service was behind the attack on the tanker, which was transporting fuel for Russian forces. A sea drone, filled with 450 kilograms (992 pounds) of TNT, was used for the attack, added the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to give official statements.
“The Sig tanker … suffered a hole in the engine room near the waterline on the starboard side, presumably as a result of a sea drone attack,” Russia’s Federal Agency for Marine and River Transport wrote on Telegram, adding that there were no casualties among the 11 crew members.
Vladimir Rogov, a Kremlin-installed official in Ukraine’s partially occupied southern Zaporizhzhia region, said several members of the ship’s crew were wounded because of broken glass.
Without specifying that Ukraine was responsible for the drone strike, Vasyl Malyuk, who leads Ukraine’s Security Service, said that “such special operations are conducted in the territorial waters of Ukraine and are completely legal.” Any such explosions, he said, are “an absolutely logical and effective step with regard to the enemy.”
The attack briefly halted traffic on the Kerch Bridge, as well as ferry transport.
Tugboats were deployed to assist the tanker, which is under United States sanctions for helping provide jet fuel to Russian forces fighting in Syria, according to Russia’s Tass news agency.
Ukraine’s earlier strike on Novorossiysk halted maritime traffic for a few hours and marked the first time a commercial Russian port has been targeted in the nearly 18-month-old conflict. The port has a naval base, shipbuilding yards and an oil terminal, and is key for exports. It lies about 110 kilometers (about 60 miles) east of Crimea.
Shipping expert Jayendu Krishna told The Associated Press that the attacks left Russian shipping activity “largely unaffected.” He believes that they may increase the risk of Russian attacks on Ukrainian ports rather than serving as a tool to put pressure on Russia to halt attacks and reinstate the grain deal.
“Every time anything happens to Russia, you see Putin in retaliation mode … therefore, you may see further attacks on other parts of Ukraine,” Krishna said.
“I think it will probably compound the effect and compound the risk in the Black Sea, rather than reducing it,” he added. “It’s very difficult for me to imagine that Russia will give in, unless and until their banks have smooth operations, and they’re able to export their own cargo uninterruptedly.”
A Telegram post on Saturday by Deputy Chair of Russia’s Security Council Dmitry Medvedev implied that Russia would increase its attacks against Ukrainian ports in response to Kyiv’s attacks on Russian ships in the Black Sea:
“Apparently, the strikes on Odesa, Izmail, and other places were not enough for them,” he wrote.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said that Moscow “strongly condemns” what it sees as a Ukrainian “terrorist attack” on a civilian vessel in the Kerch Strait.
“There can be no justification for such barbaric actions, they will not go unanswered and their authors and perpetrators will inevitably be punished,” she wrote on the Telegram messaging app.
In other developments, Russia’s Defense Ministry said Saturday it captured a settlement in Ukraine’s easternmost Luhansk region, most of which is occupied by Russia. “In the area of Kupiansk … the settlement of Novoselivske was liberated,” the ministry wrote on Telegram.
Elsewhere, a two-day summit on finding a peaceful settlement to the war kicked off in Saudi Arabia.
Senior officials from around 40 countries – but not Russia – will aim to agree key principles on how to end the conflict.
“It is very important because in such matters as food security, the fate of millions of people in Africa, Asia, and other parts of the world directly depends on how fast the world will be in implementing the Peace Formula,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said of the summit. “I am grateful to Saudi Arabia for this platform for negotiations.”
The main Ukrainian envoy to the summit in Jeddah, chief Ukrainian presidential aide Andriy Yermak, spoke of the talks on Friday night in a television interview published on his Telegram account: “I expect that the conversation will be difficult, but behind us is truth, behind us goodness,” he said.
Commenting on the talks in Saudi Arabia, Zakharova told Russian state media that the idea of making decisions on the conflict without the participation of Moscow was “absurd.” Nevertheless, she said, delegates have “full scope for creativity” to discuss the issue.
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MOSCOW (Reuters) – Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on Saturday suggested Moscow would launch more strikes against Ukrainian ports in response to Kyiv’s attacks on Russian ships in the Black Sea, and threatened to hand Ukraine “an ecological catastrophe”.
Medvedev, who is deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, a body chaired by President Vladimir Putin, spoke after Ukrainian sea drone attacks on a Russian warship in the port of Novorossiysk, and against a tanker near Crimea, which Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014.
Putin chaired a meeting of the Security Council on Friday which Medvedev attended following the attack on Novorossiysk, in which the Olenegorsky Gornyak, a Russian Navy landing ship, was reported to have been badly damaged.
“Scumbags and freaks understand only cruelty and force. Apparently, the strikes on Odesa, Izmail, and other places were not enough for them,” Medvedev said in a post on his official social media accounts.
Russia has in recent weeks targeted the Black Sea port of Odesa, where the Ukrainian Navy is headquartered, and Izmail, Ukraine’s main inland port across the Danube River from Romania, damaging port infrastructure and grain facilities.
Moscow, which last month withdrew from a deal that had allowed Ukraine to safely export its grain via the Black Sea, began the port attacks after a Ukrainian strike on the bridge which links Russia with Crimea, killing the parents of a teenage girl and causing serious damage.
The United Nations and some Western and African countries have urged Russia to return to the grain deal, something Moscow has said it will only do if and when an agreement designed to facilitate the export of Russian grain and fertilisers is implemented.
Medvedev suggested retaliatory Russian strikes against Ukraine for its sea drone attacks could end any chances of reviving the grain deal.
“If the Kyiv scum want to create an ecological disaster in the Black Sea, they should get one on the part of their territory that will soon fall to Poland and that will stink for centuries after that,” said Medvedev.
“That will be the final judgement for them on the grain deal.”
It was not clear what kind of ecological disaster Medvedev was referring to. Top Russian security officials have suggested, without providing evidence, that Polish troops will be deployed to western Ukraine at some point, while Russia will hold on to and expand the territory it has unilaterally annexed in the south and east of Ukraine.
Kyiv, which is carrying out a counteroffensive, says it remains committed to retaking all of its territory, including Crimea.
(Reporting by Andrew Osborn; Editing by David Holmes)
A Russian tanker under U.S. sanctions was hit by Ukrainian drone near a strategic bridge in the Kerch Strait that links Russia to the annexed Crimean peninsula, Kremlin officials said Saturday.
The “Sig” was damaged with a hole “near the waterline on the starboard side, presumably as a result of a sea drone attack” Russia’s Federal Agency for Marine and River Transport said in a statement posted to its Telegram channel. There were no casualties, it added.
There was no immediate public claim of responsibility by Kyiv, which usually refrains from taking credit for attacks on Russian soil, but a source in Ukraine’s Security Service, the SBU, told NBC News that it “blew up a large oil tanker of the Russian Federation,” in a joint operation with the navy.
The tanker was “transporting fuel for the Russian troops,” the source said, adding that it was well loaded and “the ‘fireworks’ could be seen from afar.” They said that a surface drone and TNT had been used to carry out the attack. NBC News could not verify their claims.
Video broadcast on Ukrainian television and shared by several officials on social media showed a sea drone moving towards the tanker before striking it. The footage cuts out before an explosion is visible. NBC News was not able to independently verify the footage.
SBU chief Vasyl Malyuk responded to the attack in a Telegram post. “Any explosions that happen with the ships of the Russian Federation or the Crimean bridge is an absolutely logical and effective step in relation to the enemy,” he said.
“If the Russians want the explosions to stop, they should use the only option for this — to leave the territorial waters of Ukraine,” he added.
Oleksiy Danilov, the secretary of Ukraine’s Security and Defense Council also appeared to reference the attack, which came a day after his country’s security services said they had carried out a drone strike on a Russian navy ship.
“With each new combat mission, Ukrainian combat UAVs and naval drones become more accurate, operators more experienced, combat coordination more effective, and manufacturers get opportunities to improve tactical and technical characteristics,” he said in a post on Twitter.
Elsewhere, Vladimir Rogov, a Russian-installed official in Zaporizhzhia in southern Ukraine, said on his Telegram channel that several crew members were slashed by broken glass in the attack. The tanker had been supplying oil to Russian troops in Syria, he said.
Photographs uploaded by Rogov in a separate post showed what he said was the inside of the tanker which had windows blown in, damaged ceilings and office furniture strewn about.
Later, Russia’s Novorossiysk Maritime Rescue Coordination Center was cited by the RIA Novosti news agency as saying that recovery work was underway on the Sig with two tugboats nearby. Water had stopped pouring into the ship, it said. There was no fuel spill as the ship had been carrying only technical ballast, the statement added.
The attack briefly halted traffic on the Crimean Bridge, and ferry transport was suspended for several hours, according to Russian-installed authorities in the area, which Russia illegally annexed from Ukraine in 2014.
The U.S. sanctioned the tanker and its owner, St. Petersburg-based company Transpetrochart, a marine freight company, for helping to provide jet fuel in Syria in 2019.
Both Russia and Ukraine have stepped up attacks in the Black Sea since Moscow exited a deal allowing the safe export of Ukrainian grain in July.
On Friday, Ukraine carried out a sea drone strike on a ship near the Russian Black Sea port of Novorossiysk. Russia claimed to have thwarted a wider attack on the port, with drones destroyed by ships guarding the base’s outer boundary.
But videos circulating online showed the Olenegorsky Gornyak, a Soviet-era warship, being towed back to the port after a Ukrainian intelligence source said it had been damaged in the attack.
NBC News was able to confirm that videos were filmed in Novorossiysk and showed the same class of warship as the Olenegorsky Gornyak, using marine ship tracking data and satellite imagery.
On Wednesday, Russian drone strikes on the port cities of Odesa and Izmail caused significant damage and fires at facilities key to grain exports.
Odesa, a sea and transport hub and major cultural center, has been hammered by strikes in recent weeks, with dozens of drones and missile attacks targeting sea and river ports.
Ukraine is a major supplier of wheat, corn, vegetable oil and other agricultural products important to the Middle East, Africa and parts of Asia where people are struggling with high food prices and hunger.
Though the nation can also export by road and rail through Europe, those routes are more costly than going by the Black Sea and have stirred divisions among nearby countries.
