There are going to be a lot of conflicting claims - mainly to keep the Russians guessing.
I’m not sure the Minister of Defense can be accurately called a “Scapegoat” for a military failure. He legitimately holds responsibility for this fiasco.
One can make their own moral judgments, but a soldier in uniform is a legitimate military target unless he has clearly shown intent to surrender or is wounded and incapacitated. It doesn’t matter if he is visibly carrying a weapon or not.
The means of targeting a ship docked in port is available on your smart phone.
For modern NATO missiles, sure, but that’s not what we have here. Do the Ukrainians have this capacity?
Does it matter? If they do, then the Russians need to be very cautious about risking any more of their supply ships in that port, at least until they’ve identified and taken out those missiles. And if they don’t and the explosion was either a lucky shot or a Russian mistake (happens in every war–see Port Chicago disaster for an example), the Ukranians aren’t going to admit it, they’ll use it to keep the Russians guessing…(first rule of war: everybody lies). Either way it’s another setback for the Rus and on a front they’ve had some success with.
We shall see. Press on.
Recent footage of that ship fire shows a second ship was also apparently struck:
BBC saying unconfirmed reports that at least three ships were seen on fire.
EDIT: these two ships are the Ropucha-class LST Tsesar Kunikov and Novocherkassk seen leaving the port immediately after the attack on the supply ship. Based on casualty reports from telegram channels, the smoking one is Tsesar Kunikov. The one in the foreground had a small amount of smoke coming from it so that might be considered to be the ‘third’ ship.
Oh, yes, without a doubt. Another factor I thought about is, they now have a smoking ruin blocking one of the piers. So even if they have more ships, the capacity of the port itself has been significantly impaired, and repairing that in the middle of a war has all sorts of extra challenges.
On how to use GPS to guide a missile? Of course they do. Any missile with a “steering wheel” can be guided by GPS.
Twitter is reporting that Ukrainians are encircling around 10,000 Russian troops near Kyiv in the “Bucha Pocket.” I sense a Cannae 2.0 coming…
You make this (adding GPS guidance to a missile) sound like it’s a trivially easy task. It’s not.
Some thoughts on the sinking of the ship at Berdyansk this morning.
This is a major strategic setback for Russia. They can no longer use that port to resupply and reinforce their troops in southern Ukraine. It seriously weakens their position in the south-east.
Even if they eventually capture Mariupol, the docks and port there will be destroyed and unusable. They currently have control of the coastline between Crimea and Donbas, but this will make it far more difficult to hold. In the south-west, they have stalled completely at the port of Mykolaiv, and I don’t believe they have any hope of taking Odesa.
EU diplomats have been saying that Putin’s idea is that he will be ready to negotiate once he has cut Ukraine off from the sea. That would allow him to negotiate from a position of strength and ask for territorial concessions from Ukraine.
However, the strike on Berdyansk makes it clear how completely unrealistic Putin’s idea is. He’s still out of touch with reality.
For you or me? Probably not. For a trained Ukrainian army technician knowledgeable enough to fire the missile in the first place? Probably a piece of cake. And that’s assuming the missiles don’t already have it (the technology predates the fall of the USSR). And it’s not like the Ukrainians would wait for war to break out to update the guidance systems on their missiles.
Retired Lieutenant General Mark Hertling has likened the “Bucha Gap” to the Falaise Pocket.
Not quite Cannae, but an important step nonetheless, if Ukraine hopes to make Russia finally back down and negotiate seriously. And after all, that tactic was, as far as I can tell, pretty much the Russian plan; let their Northern and Southern wings meet in the center of Ukraine and cut off most of the Ukrainian troops fighting in the Eastern half of the country. But the northern attack apparently is in trouble and the southern one is being held up by the desperate defense of Mariupol and now the loss(es) on the naval side, so the Russians now have to refigure and ‘improvise’…and that is something history tells us they do not do well at all.
We shall see.
FWIW, the video does not mention the Ukrainian navy … only “forces.” Only reason I point that out is that the idea that the Ukrainians were able to hit that ship with a long-range missile is still in play.
Sure, at the start of the war all the troops could play canasta, but now their stuck with Eucher.
I sincerely hope this is true, but is this a fact or an inference? Is the port physically destroyed or are you just saying that it’s not (currently) safe to use?
I think just knowing that the port is in missile range should be enough to discourage its use.
I agree, but what I’m getting at is that it’s clearly in missile range now, but that could change if Russia destroys the missile batteries (?) that hit it. So if the port is not physically destroyed, it might be able to be used in the future, depending on how things progress.