For the second time in less than a month, Russia’s naval base at Sevastopol has come under a drone attack. Plumes of smoke were seen rising after the incident on Saturday morning, which the Russian-appointed governor of the city, Mikhail Razvozhaev, said came after a drone flew over the sensitive military site.
In narrow military terms the attack is not significant. Razvozhaev said it involved a single drone. Footage from a local Telegram channel appears to back that up. But a key question is how a drone was able to evade Russian electronic warfare defences and fly right over the naval base.
What sounds like small arms fire, not air defence systems, can be heard on some of the videos and the drone may have been shot down before delivering a payload. Razvozhaev said initially the drone had not been hit, before saying it was. At the very least, though, it is embarrassing for Russia, which is struggling to show it can defend what it considers its own back yard.
Experts such as Justin Bronk from the Royal United Services Institute think tank suggest the drone in the film could have been a commercially available Chinese-made model, the $9,500 (£8,030) Mugin-5, or a copy of it. It has a flying time of up to seven hours, the manufacturers say, and a top speed of 150km/h (95mph) and could have been adapted to carry an improvised warhead. The payload, the manufacturers say, is 15 to 20 kilograms.
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The drone may also have been simply engaged in reconnaissance, although the growing evidence of a pattern of drone strikes deep behind the frontline in Crimea and elsewhere suggests something different. Russia said the same naval base was hit by a drone strike at the end of July, wounding five people, making the fact that defences were not tightened all the more remarkable.
A video, originally from a Russian military blogger, showed a similar-looking aircraft being used in a kamikaze strike on an oil refinery at Novoshakhtinsk, inside Russian territory near Rostov, just across the border from occupied Donetsk. The similarity is unlikely to be a coincidence.
Ukraine continues to decline to take formal responsibility for such attacks, though it does do so sometimes in private. In public the country’s leaders prefer to make knowing comments that are not always subtle. Take Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s statement overnight: “This year, one can literally feel in the air of Crimea that the occupation there is temporary, and Ukraine is returning.”
The suggestion is that Ukraine has evolved a new method of attack, aimed at sowing “chaos within Russian forces”, as the key Zelenskiy adviser Mykhailo Podolyak told the Guardian last week. Some experts believe drones operated by special forces were responsible for the dramatic attack on the Saky airbase, where about nine combat planes that supported Russia’s Black Sea fleet were destroyed.
In any event, such drone strikes will have a practical effect. The Institute for the Study of War said “Russian occupation officials in Crimea are likely considering strengthening security on the peninsula” and that “such measures may draw Russian security forces away from the frontlines”.
But the critical point is the psychological impact. Repeatedly captured on video, they demonstrate that Crimea and similar behind-the-lines locations are not safe, bringing the conflict closer to Russia and the occupied territories, while at the same time being focused (at least so far) on military and industrial targets.
A string of social media videos show traffic jams on roads out of the Crimean peninsula, including at least one released on Saturday, suggesting Russians who moved into the territory after it was occupied and annexed in 2014 no longer consider it safe. Others show traffic jams out of Sevastopol to Yalta.
If that is the effect of a handful of drone strikes, Ukraine will consider the effort justified. No wonder Razvozhaev told Russians in Sevastopol that it was time to fight the propaganda war better as he appealed for everyone to remain calm because the local air defence system was now working. “Upload videos with the work of our air defence systems,” he said. — Guardian