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 Russian military’s damaged Black Sea flagship sinks; Moscow targets factory near Kyiv that allegedly made the missiles that struck the warship

The flagship of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, a guided-missile cruiser that became a potent target of Ukrainian defiance in the opening days of the war, sank on April 14 after it was heavily damaged in the latest setback for Moscow’s invasion.

Ukrainian officials said their forces hit the vessel with missiles, while Russia acknowledged a fire aboard the Moskva but no attack.

The loss of the warship named for the Russian capital is a devastating symbolic defeat for Moscow as its troops regroup for a renewed offensive in eastern Ukraine after retreating from much of the north, including the capital.

The Russian Defence Ministry said the ship sank in a storm while being towed to a port. Russia earlier said the flames on the ship, which would typically have 500 sailors on board, forced the entire crew to evacuate. It later said the blaze had been contained and that the ship would be towed to port with its missile launchers intact.

The ship had the capacity to carry 16 long-range cruise missiles, and its removal reduces Russia’s firepower in the Black Sea. It’s also a blow to Russian prestige in a war already widely seen as a historic blunder. Now entering its eighth week, Russia’s invasion has stalled because of resistance from Ukrainian fighters bolstered by weapons and other aid sent by Western nations.

The news of the flagship’s damage overshadowed Russian claims of advances in the southern port city of Mariupol, where they have been battling the Ukrainians since the early days of the invasion in some of the heaviest fighting of the war — at a horrific cost to civilians.

Maksym Marchenko, the Governor of the Odesa region, across the Black Sea to the northwest of Sevastopol, said the Ukrainians had struck the ship with two Neptune missiles and caused “serious damage”.

Russia’s Defence Ministry said ammunition on board detonated as a result of a fire, without saying what caused the blaze. It said the “main missile weapons” were not damaged. In addition to the cruise missiles, the warship also had air-defence missiles and other guns.

The Neptune is an anti-ship missile that was recently developed by Ukraine and based on an earlier Soviet design. The launchers are mounted on trucks stationed near the coast, and, according to the Washington-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies, the missiles can hit targets up to 280 kilometres (175 miles) away. That would have put the Moskva within range, based on where it was when the fire began.

Other Russian ships that were also in the northern Black Sea moved further south after the Moskva caught fire, said a senior U.S. defence official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal military assessments.

The U.S. was not able to confirm Ukraine’s claims of striking the warship, U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan said on Thursday. Still, he called it “a big blow to Russia”.

“They’ve had to kind of choose between two stories: One story is that it was just incompetence, and the other was that they came under attack, and neither is a particularly good outcome for them,” Sullivan told the Economic Club of Washington.

Meanwhile, a Ukrainian military factory outside Kyiv that produced missiles allegedly used to hit the Russian warship was partly destroyed by overnight Russian strikes, an AFP journalist at the scene saw on Friday.
A man walks near a building with a collapsed facade at the Vizar company military-industrial complex, after the site was hit by overnight Russian strikes in the town of Vyshneve, southwestern suburbs of Kyiv on April 15, 2022.

A workshop and an administrative building at the Vizar plant, which lies near Kyiv’s international Zhuliany airport, were seriously damaged. Russia had earlier announced it had hit the factory using Kalibr sea-based long-range missiles.

According to a statement on Ukraine’s state weapons manufacturer Ukroboronprom website, the Vizar factory produced Neptune missiles.  Andrei Sizov, a 47-year-old owner of a nearby wood workshop, said the strikes came at night. “Around 1:30 am, my security guard called me because there was an air strike,” he told AFP.

“There were five hits. My employee was in the office and got thrown off his feet by the blast.” He said he believes Russia was taking revenge for the Moskva warship.