Patriotic defenders made Vlad shout “you sank my battleship!” Ukraine isn’t as weak as Vladimir Putin’s generals led him to believe. On Thursday, “the entire crew of the Moskva” was “forced to evacuate after a fire overnight.” The warship normally carries 500 aboard. The crew also reported the ship itself was “badly damaged.” It didn’t sink right away. It sunk when they tried to tow it home.
Ukraine scores big
Moscow is trying hard to regroup for a “renewed offensive in eastern Ukraine after retreating from much of the north, including the capital.” Those plans suffered a serious setback on April 13, when the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea fleet was “struck and seriously damaged.” The home team get bonus points for the optics of taking a high value target.
The Russians are refusing to “acknowledge any attack.” The ship blew up all by itself. If everyone knew they were hit with two missiles it would be “a major blow to Russian prestige seven weeks into a war that is already widely seen as a historic blunder.”
All the allies of Ukraine are scrounging equipment and support for the embattled nation, especially the three who are also uneasy neighbors of Russia, like Lithuania. That country’s President Gitanas Nauseda summed it up when he declared that “the fight for Europe’s future is happening here.”
⚡️⚡️Russia says its flagship Moskva has sunk.
On the day before, Ukraine said that Moskva was hit by Ukrainian Neptune anti-ship missiles in the Black Sea.
Russia claimed that the missile cruiser suffered from a fire that detonated ammunition on board.
— The Kyiv Independent (@KyivIndependent) April 14, 2022
Joe Biden won’t step into the fight because he knows it would start nuclear Armageddon. But, he called the Russian atrocities “genocide” and promised to throw another $800 million at it.
Russians will be taking the loss of the Moskva hard because it cancels out some of their recent gains. They finally took the Ukraine town of Mariupol to open a path for forces from the south to reinforce the eastern Donbas region. According to the governor of the Odesa region, Maksym Marchenko, resistance forces “struck the guided-missile cruiser with two Neptune missiles.”
They could tell immediately that they caused “serious damage.” That’s a lie, Russia’s Defense Ministry objects. What really happened is “ammunition on board detonated as a result of a fire.”
Sunk in ‘stormy seas’
After not being hit by missiles off Ukraine, the Moskva managed to sink in “stormy seas” while “being towed to a port in the Black Sea,” the Russian defense ministry was forced to announce. Four of Putin’s ships were steaming in for a rescue but a storm kept them from getting near the doomed vessel.
The spin doctors at the Kremlin wrote a new prescription to say the “cruiser ship Moskva lost its stability when it was towed to the port because of the damage to the ship’s hull that it received during the fire from the detonation of ammunition. In stormy sea conditions, the ship sank.”
The Moskva reportedly “was the pride of Russia’s Black Sea naval fleet and the most prestigious vessel involved in the war against Ukraine.”
As the Irish Times points out, destruction of the Black Sea behemoth “is symbolically important as Russia’s leading ship in the fleet. But also because it was the vessel involved in the standoff with the Ukrainian border guards of Snake Island, in which they replied to a demand for their surrender with the now-famous words ‘Russian warship, go f**k yourself.‘”
The thing that really has Kremlin officials turning purple is the fact it’s “particularly striking for a naval flagship to have been taken out by a country without much of a navy of its own.” The whole strategy to save Ukraine comes down to guerrilla warfare. “Determination and perseverance despite being vastly outnumbered is crucial.”
The idea is that “even if territory were to be successfully seized by the invading army it would face determined guerrilla warfare from domestic forces that would make it difficult and expensive to keep.“
