On the afternoon of September 14, the Ministry of Defense of Russia announced the unsuccessful attack of a naval drone on the missile ship "Samum" in the Black Sea. The agency reported the destruction of one drone.
On the morning of September 14, the Ministry of Defense also spoke about a drone attack. There were allegedly five of them — they aimed at the patrol ship "Sergei Kotov", but they were "destroyed".
Already at 7:20 p.m., the Center for Strategic Communications of the Armed Forces of Ukraine reported an attack on two Russian ships of the project 22160 "Vasily Bykov" type. They are damaged. It happened in the southwestern part of the Black Sea.
Project 22160 is patrol ships (corvettes). There are four of them on the water in Russia: "Vasily Bykov", "Dmitry Rogachev", "Pavel Derzhavin" and "Sergei Kotov". It was the attack on the latter that was reported by the Ministry of Defense of Russia.
Subsequently, the head of the Ministry of Statistics, Mykhailo Fedorov, showed a video of a naval drone attack on a Russian ship. Given the contours of the ship, it is a project 22160 corvette. It can be assumed that this is the footage of the attack on the patrol boat "Sergei Kotov".
- On August 1, the Russian Ministry of Defense reported an "unsuccessful" attack by three naval drones on patrol ships of the Black Sea Fleet 340 km from Sevastopol, which the Russians allegedly repelled. However, Babelʼs source in the security and defense sector informed that the Russian sailors of one of these ships asked for the evacuation of the victims, which contradicts the claims of the "successful repulsion" of the drone attack. Intercepted conversation here. At the time of the conversation, there was at least one dead and five wounded.
- Among those attacked were "Sergey Kotov", "Vasily Bykov" and the container ship Sparta-IV, which, according to Naval News and observers, was carrying weapons from Syria. Because of this, the SBU notified its captain Oleksiy Tereshchenko of suspicion in June.
- This is not the first time that the Ministry of Defense of Russia reports on the successful repulsion of a drone attack on warships, and then there are confirmations of the opposite.
- On May 24 of this year, two drones attacked the warship "Ivan Khurs". The video of the attack appeared the next day. The footage shows that the attack involved naval drones from the so-called drone fleet, which was raised through UNITED24. Such drones have already carried out attacks on Russian ships of the Black Sea Fleet.