(Moscow) The strategic Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea, which Kyiv wants to take back from Moscow, which bases its Black Sea fleet there, was targeted by a drone attack on Tuesday, without much damage according to pro-Russian local authorities.
The Moscow-installed governor of the administrative region of Sevastopol, Mikhail Razvojayev reported “an attack with drones”. “Our air defense forces are in action at this very moment,” he said in a first message on Telegram, calling on residents to “stay calm”.
According to a second message from Mr. Razvozhayev, which did not report any casualties, no civilian infrastructure was damaged.
He said the air defenses shot down two drones near the Balaklava power plant, which has suffered attacks from the Ukrainian army in the past. “Now the city is calm,” Mr. Razvozhayev said.
The Russian Black Sea Fleet is based in the port of Sevastopol. She had been attacked there in late October in what pro-Russian authorities called a “massive” drone attack by the Ukrainian military.
This operation, which damaged at least one Russian military vessel, led Moscow to briefly withdraw from the agreement allowing the export of Ukrainian cereals.
Kyiv has inflicted several humiliations on the Russian fleet whose cruise missiles regularly hit its territory. In the spring, Ukraine had notably sunk the Russian flagship, the cruiser Moskva.
Russia had annexed Crimea in 2014 and Kyiv, whose army continues to push back that of Moscow in southern Ukraine, aims to reconquer it.
Mikolaiv almost “free”
The region’s governor said last week that authorities were strengthening their positions on the peninsula, as Kyiv forces reclaim territory in the neighboring Kherson region.
In August, a drone attack against the Russian fleet headquarters in Sevastopol did not cause any injuries.
But on July 31, another of these machines had landed in the courtyard of the general staff, injuring five of its employees and causing the cancellation of military festivities planned for that day.
Elsewhere on the front, Ukrainians and Russians clashed Tuesday on the tip of Kinbourne, a piece of land nestled at the tip of the left bank of the Dnieper in southern Ukraine, south of Mikolaiv, according to Ukrainian authorities.
“We have three localities left (to be taken over) on the Kinbourne peninsula” before completely liberating the Mikolaiv region (south), said regional governor Vitali Kim.
The capture by the Ukrainian army of the last three villages in the Mikolaiv region from the hands of the Russians would mark another important victory for Kyiv, a few days after having driven Moscow troops out of Kherson, the main Ukrainian city occupied until then, after a two-month counter-offensive. Russia had conquered this area in the early days of its invasion, launched on February 24.
In Kherson itself, the Ukrainian public prosecutor’s office announced on Monday that it had found four “torture sites” used by the Russians before their forced retreat from the region ten days ago, Kyiv accusing Moscow of war crimes – as it was already the case in many areas taken back from the Russians.
On Tuesday, Ukrainian investigators claimed to have arrested for “treason” – punishable by life in Ukraine – an official of Russian remand centers in Kherson who “worked for the invaders […] as responsible for remand centers and places where sentences are served”.
Three dead in Russia
During the night from Tuesday to Wednesday, “huge missiles” fell “on a small maternity hospital in Vilnyansk”, killing a newborn, wrote on Telegram Oleksandr Starukh, of the military administration of the Zaporizhia region.
Earlier, in Russia, explosions killed three people in the region of Belgorod, bordering Ukraine, announced on Tuesday the governor of this territory regularly hit by fire attributed to the Ukrainian army and where fortifications are under construction .
On Telegram, Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said a woman had died after a bombardment in Chebekino, a town eight kilometers from Ukraine.
According to the same source, two people died in the explosion of “unidentified ammunition” in the village of Starosselié, also bordering Ukraine.
The regional capital, also called Belgorod, has already been directly hit on several occasions.
The leader of the Russian paramilitary group Wagner, Yevgeny Prigozhin, ordered the construction of fortifications in the Russian regions of Belgorod and Kursk, as well as in the Luhansk region occupied by Moscow in eastern Ukraine. Last week, Moscow also announced fortification works in Crimea.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for his part called on French mayors to provide aid to his country to prevent Russia from using the cold this winter “as a weapon of mass destruction”, in a message broadcast during the congress of the Association of French Mayors (AMF) in Paris.
“To survive this winter and prevent Russia from turning the cold into an instrument of terror and submission, we need a lot of things,” he added.