Russia, meanwhile said a fire broke out on the guided-missile cruiser, causing munitions aboard to explode, inflicting serious damage to the vessel, and forcing the crew of the warship to be evacuated.
Analysts said its loss struck hard at the heart of the Russian navy as well as national pride, comparable to the US Navy losing a battleship during World War II or an aircraft carrier today.
What followed was a string of naval defeats for Moscowโs Black Sea Fleet.
In early 2024, six sea drones, powered by jet skis, felled a Russian guided missile ship, the Ivanovets. Night-time footage released by the Ukrainians showed Russians firing at the drones as they raced toward the Ivanovets, before at least two drones struck the side of the ship, disabling it and causing massive explosions.
Damage to the Kerch bridge
Built following Russiaโs 2014 annexation of Crimea, the 12-mile Kerch bridge was a vital supply line for Moscowโs war effort in Ukraine and a personal project for Putin, embodying his objective to bind the peninsula to Russia.
Russia built the bridge at a cost of around $3.7 billion
In July, 2023, Ukrainian security services claimed to have blown up the bridge using an experimental sea drone. The attack caused damage to the road lanes of the bridge, and, according to Russian officials, killed two civilians.
The head of the SBU, Vasyl Maliuk, told CNN at the time that the Kerch attack was a joint operation with the Ukrainian navy.
The bridge is a critical artery for supplying Crimea with both its daily needs and supplies for the military.
Mysterious assassinations
A number of high profile Russian military figures have been killed inside the country over the past year. Crucially, Ukraine has never claimed the killings but it is notable that many of those killed played prominent roles in Moscowโs .
Last month, Russian deputy mayor and prominent veteran of the war, Zaur Aleksandrovich Gurtsiev, was killed in an explosion in southern Russia. Russian authorities said they were investigating all options into the killing, โincluding the organization of a terrorist attackโ involving Ukraine.
Gurtsiev had been involved in the Russian attacks on the Ukrainian port city of Mariupol, which destroyed about 90% of residential buildings, according to United Nations estimates.
Gurtsiev had โintroduced his developments in the technology of targeting missiles, which allowed them to increase their accuracy and effectiveness many times over,โ according to the โTime of Heroesโ program.
In April, Russian authorities charged a โUkrainian special services agentโ with terrorism, after he was detained in connection with a car explosion that killed Russian General Yaroslav Moskalik, the deputy head of the Main Operations Directorate of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces.
And in February Armen Sarkisyan, the founder of a pro-Russian militia group in eastern Ukraine โ described by authorities in Kyiv as a โcriminal mastermindโ โ died following a bombing in central Moscow. The bombing took place in an upmarket residential complex in the capital city, Russian state media outlet TASS reported at the time.
Ukraine has never claimed the killings but it is notable that high-profile figures have been assassinated in Russian territory.
- strike hard at the heart of ~: ~์ ํต์ฌ์ ์ ํต์ผ๋ก ๊ฐํํ๋ค
- felled a ship: (๋ฌด์ธ๊ฐ๋ฅผ) ๊ฒฉ์นจ์ํค๋ค, ์ฐ๋ฌ๋จ๋ฆฌ๋ค
- Annexation: ํฉ๋ณ, ๊ฐ์ ํธ์
- a critical artery: ์ค์ํ ์์ก ๊ฒฝ๋ก, ํต์ฌ ํต๋ก
- high-profile figure: ๊ณ ์ ์ธ๋ฌผ, ์ธ๋ก ์ฃผ๋ชฉ์ ๋ฐ๋ ์ธ์ฌ
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