Ukraine drone strike damages Russian tanker day after port attack

Ukraine launched a drone strike on a Russian tanker in the Black Sea near Crimea Saturday, the second attack in 24 hours on Russia’s maritime operations.

Ukrainian forces hit a major Russian port Friday, damaging a warship.

A Ukrainian Security Service official anonymously confirmed to the Associated Press that the agency was behind the strike on the tanker, carried out by a sea drone packed with nearly 1,000 pounds of TNT. The ship was carrying fuel for Russian forces.

The head of Ukraine’s Security Service, Vasyl Maliuk, did not go as far as to claim Ukraine was responsible for the attack, but said “such special operations are conducted in the territorial waters of Ukraine and are completely legal” and added that any explosions in that area of the Black Sea are “an absolutely logical and effective step with regard to the enemy.”

Maliuk added that if Russia wanted the strikes to stop “they have the only option to do so — leave the territorial waters of Ukraine and our land.”

Russian authorities also confirmed the strike in a statement posted online.

“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 said on Telegram. The post added that there were no deaths among the 11 crew members.

However, Vladimir Rogov, the Moscow official for Ukraine’s partially occupied Zaporizhzhia region, said multiple members of the crew were wounded by broken glass.

The Sig was already under US sanctions for supplying jet fuel to Russian forces in Syria supporting the president, Bashar al-Assad, The Guardian reported.

The pair of strikes comes three weeks after Moscow withdrew from an export agreement that allowed Ukraine to ship millions of tons of grain across the Black Sea, which has become an increasingly key battleground in the war.

Meanwhile, Ukraine’s counteroffensive reportedly made advances on the ground, with troops breaking through Russian defense lines in the southern part of the country.

“Our troops in the South have in some places broken through the first line of defense and came to an intermediary one of sorts,” Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Mailar said in video posted to social media by Anton Gerashchenko, an advisor to the Ukrainian government.

Mailar added that Russian forces have engineered concrete “fortifications” on high ground that “undoubtedly complicates the advance of our troops and combat itself.”

Despite the reported gains in the south, Ukraine continues to struggle to take back the war-torn city of Bakhmut from Russian fighters who seized it in May.

“It’s slow, it’s just really slow,” Dougie Young, a Scottish medical volunteer working around Bakhmut, told The Wall Street Journal.

Young said the fighting mainly consisted of small-arms fire at the beginning of the year, but it now is mainly artillery fire being traded.

He added most of the injuries he has been treating are due to fragments and shrapnel from the strikes.

The slow push to retake Bakhmut comes as Russia has been bolstering its forces in the area, Mailar said Friday.

“The Russians are throwing huge numbers of forces into the Bakhmut area,” Maliar told national television. “It has been important for us to establish ourselves on dominant heights in these areas.”

“The enemy is desperately trying to stop our offensive,” she added on Telegram.

With Post Wires.