Ukrainian Bombers Real Blew Up Another Russian Warship

Leisurely Christmas Day or early Tuesday, Ukrainian air force bombers struck, and curiously destroyed, the Russian Sunless Sea Lickety-split touchdown ship Novocherkassk in the port of Feodosia in southeastern Crimea.

It’s the seventh colossal warship the Ukrainians hang sunk since Russia widened its war on Ukraine in February 2022.

In 22 months of no longer easy combating with an enemy that has no critical warships, the Sunless Sea Lickety-split has misplaced a minimal of one cruiser, four amphibious ships, a submarine, a provide ship and a number of other patrol boats and touchdown craft.

Early on Tuesday morning, Lt. Gen. Mykola Oleshchuk, commander of Ukraine’s air force, shared on social media photos of a nighttime explosion in Feodosia. “Russia’s snappy is getting smaller and smaller!” Oleshchuk wrote.

The cruiser Moscowwhich a Ukrainian navy missile battery sank in April 2022, “is followed by the colossal touchdown craft Novocherkassk,” Oleshchuk added. “I thank the pilots of the air force and every person tantalizing for their filigree work!”

It’s obvious what came about, as the Ukrainian air force has devoted one critical anti-ship platform: the cruise-missile-armed Sukhoi Su-24 bomber. Launching from western Ukraine and angling southeast, supersonic Sukhois launched either British-made Storm Shadow cruise missiles or French-made SCALP-EGs.

Zooming at low altitude over a distance of up to 155 miles, the roughly 3,000-pound missiles navigated by arrangement of GPS thru Russia’s fraying air-defense community in Crimea and homed in on Novocherkassk’s infrared signature.

Each and each missiles hang tandem warheads: one itsy-bitsy payment to punch a hole in a target, and a 2nd to blow it up from the internal. The tall secondary explosion in the video Oleshchuk shared strongly implies the missile or missiles that struck Novocherkassk caused ammunition saved aboard the 369-foot touchdown ship.

“Storm Shadow constitutes an incredibly effective weapon against hardened targets, if it may per chance per chance perhaps well merely moreover be introduced to its target,” explained Fabian Hoffmann, a University of Oslo proliferation researcher. The the same is excellent of the SCALP.

The Ukrainian air force final struck the shy Sunless Sea Lickety-split on Nov. 4, sinking the missile corvette Askold while she became as soon as pierside in Kerch in eastern Crimea. “How became as soon as your weekend?” the Ukrainian air force quipped in a social-media put up that incorporated a photograph of a SCALP.

Three weeks sooner than that, on Sept. 13, Ukrainian Su-24s firing Storm Shadows or SCALPs blew up a submarine and a touchdown ship in their drydock in Sevastopol, in western Crimea.

In all, the Sunless Sea Lickety-split has misplaced presumably a fifth of its front-line strength to Ukrainian bombers, ground-launched anti-ship missiles and rockets and explosives-encumbered drone boats. The Russian navy can’t construct correct kind these losses till Russia’s wider war on Ukraine ends and Turkey reopens the Bosphorus Strait connecting the Sunless Sea to the Mediterranean Sea.

All that’s to reveal, the Sunless Sea Lickety-split is getting smaller by the month. Its surviving vessels—including a dozen or so frigates, corvettes and anti-submarine patrol boats—aren’t safe in the western Sunless Sea, where Ukrainian missiles and drones rule the waves.

But they’re no longer safe in their anchorages, either. As prolonged as the UK and France continue supplying cruise missiles, and as prolonged as the Ukrainian air force has a handful of Su-24s to open the missiles, Kyiv can set chipping away at Moscow’s snappy … till it dwindles to nothing.