Russian officials reported that Ukrainian drones struck a Russian tanker in the Kerch Strait, just one day after Kyiv claimed to have carried out a drone strike on a navy ship. The Russian Federal Agency for Marine and River Transport stated that the tanker, named SIG, sustained damage in the engine room near the waterline on the starboard side due to a suspected sea drone attack. Fortunately, there were no reported casualties.
Following the incident, two tugboats were dispatched to the scene to assist the tanker. The attack briefly disrupted traffic on the Kerch Bridge, a vital highway connecting Russian-occupied Crimea to the Russian mainland.
Russian-appointed officials reported hearing explosions near the bridge early on Saturday, linking them to the attack on the tanker by Ukrainian drones. The ship, identified as the chemical tanker SIG and under US sanctions for supplying jet fuel to Russian forces in Syria, had 11 people on board, and fortunately, no fuel spillage occurred.
Despite the incident, Ukraine, which rarely comments on attacks on Russian targets, made no official statement.
Vladimir Rogov
Vladimir Rogov, a Russian-installed official in the southern Ukrainian region of Zaporizhzhia, stated that the attack injured several members of the ship’s crew with broken glass. He wrote on Telegram that the detonation due to the explosion on the ship was visible from the peninsula, causing local residents to mistake it for an explosion near the Yakovenkovo settlement close to the Crimean Bridge.
Traffic on the Kerch Bridge came to a halt for about three hours and resumed early on Saturday, as per the highways information center’s Telegram channel.
This latest attack in the Black Sea occurred a day after Ukraine claimed to have carried out a seaborne drone strike on a Russian warship at the Novorossiysk naval base in southern Russia. In response, Russia stated that it had repelled the attempted attack on the base by the Ukrainian armed forces “with the use of two unmanned sea boats.”
The number of attacks in the Black Sea has increased between both sides since Moscow exited a deal last month that had allowed Ukrainian grain exports via the shipping hub during the conflict between the two countries.
The bridge, completed by Russia in 2018, four years after Moscow annexed the peninsula from Ukraine, has faced two major attacks in the 17-month-old Russian invasion of Ukraine, with the most recent one occurring last month.