The fog of war is thick off the coast of Ukraine and any assertion, from one side or another, must be taken with caution.
On Saturday, Ukraine launched a salvo of Storm Shadow cruise missiles against the Crimean peninsula, which hosts Russia's main naval base in the Black Sea at Sevastopol.
On this occasion, the Ukrainian Air Force, which operates fighter-bombers capable of using these British-made weapons, announced that it had
“successfully hit” two Russian
Ropucha
-class landing ships
, the
Azov
and
Yamal
.
The latter was even
“critically damaged”
, according to Ukrainian military intelligence.
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In the process, many Ukrainian accounts even announced on X that the two amphibious ships had been
“destroyed”
.
An assertion which does not seem to be confirmed, at this stage, by the publication of a first satellite image of the Sevastopol naval base dated March 24.
In the photo, two Ropucha
class ships
clearly appear: one of them seems to be escorted towards a floating dock, but does not show any apparent damage - it is certainly escorted by port tugs, but the maneuver is classic in same case - ;
the second appears to be moored alongside a quay, again with no apparent damage.
On the other hand, black marks - like a burnt area - do appear, but on the dock itself and not on the ship.
“This burn mark does not appear blatantly in past images
,” decrypts on start of the conflict.
“It is unclear whether the amphibious ship was damaged and (if so) to what extent
,” he concluded, noting that
“there does not appear to be any major response underway.”
“It appears that Storm Shadow
's strike
missed both targets, inflicting minimal damage to the two Ropucha-class landing ships
,” Frederik Van Lokeren, a Russian naval researcher and former Belgian naval officer.
Another ship hit?
According to kyiv, another Russian ship may have been damaged in the attack.
“We suspect that, most likely, the ship
Ivan Khurs
was also damaged
,” said the spokesperson for the Ukrainian navy, Dmytro Pletenchuk, on Tuesday March 25.
Unlike the two landing ships, old since they were put into service in 1988 and 1990, the
Ivan Khurs
is a recent intelligence ship, entering the Russian navy in 2018. But again, no independent information allows, at this stage , to confirm or deny the fact that he was hit.
In May 2023, the Ukrainians had already announced that the ship had been
“damaged”
or even
“destroyed”
by a naval drone attack.
For several months, however, numerous satellite images have shown the ship without apparent damage.
The results of Saturday's attack therefore still require the conditional.
The fact remains that the Russian Navy has been deeply affected by Ukrainian missile launches and naval drone strikes since the start of the war.
In an investigation published at the beginning of March,
Le Figaro
showed that at least 20% of Russian ships in the Black Sea had been damaged or destroyed (and even 30% of the tonnage of this fleet, one of the four that make up the Russian navy).
If the most recent ships - notably those carrying Kalibr cruise missiles - were mostly spared, the amphibious ships were on the other hand decimated.
Of a total of nine, three were destroyed and two heavily damaged in two years of war.
The
Azov
and
Yamal
are among the remaining four.
Read alsoBlack Sea: X-ray of the Russian fleet harassed by Ukrainian drones and missiles
These landing ships, which cannot be used to seriously threaten the Ukrainian coast of the Black Sea, on the other hand play an essential logistical role between Russia and Crimea.
Moscow nevertheless has land and even rail connections to compensate for this naval attrition, being able to pass both by the Kerch bridge which spans the strait of the same name, but also now by the occupied territories of the Zaporizhia and Kherson oblasts.