Ukraine strikes Russian ships near Crimea, escalating attacks on fuel supplies

Leaving the Sea of Azov is not necessarily a guarantee of safety from Ukraine’s drone strikes.

Ukraine’s general staff released footage on Wednesday of a naval drone attack on a sanctioned tanker called Blue.

The onboard footage shows the unmanned vessel evading fire as it approaches the tanker, before the video cuts out as it approaches the ship’s hull.

Although the location cannot be confirmed, Ukraine said the incident occurred near Yalta, a Black Sea resort city in occupied Crimea.

The tanker attacks coincide with continued strikes on Russian oil refineries, which have caused widespread fuel shortages across the country including in Moscow and St Petersburg.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has argued that by targeting oil refineries Kyiv is rightly responding to Russia’s strikes and that Russians must “feel that it is their state that is waging war”.

He highlighted two further attacks on oil depots, in the Tver and Stavropol regions hundreds of kilometres from the front line, as well as an unnamed oil terminal in Rostov region, believed to be Yug Rusi, inland from Taganrog Bay.

US President Donald Trump described the drone strategy as an escalation when he met Zelensky at the Nato summit in Ankara on Tuesday, “but it’s also an escalation that can help lead to an end”.

But it is the scale of drone attacks on Russian maritime logistics that appears to have intensified in recent days.

Brovdi claimed attacks on 12 tankers in just one night from Wednesday into Thursday, and Russian pro-war sources have not questioned either the details or the authenticity of the footage.