In narrow military terms the attack is not important. Razvozhaev said it involved a single drone. Footage from a local Telegram channel seems to support this. But a key question is how a drone was able to evade Russian electronic warfare defenses and fly directly over the naval base. What sounds like small arms fire, not air defense systems, can be heard in some of the videos, and the drone may have been shot down before delivering its payload. Razvozhaev initially said the drone had not been hit, before saying it had. At the very least, however, it is embarrassing for Russia, which is struggling to show it can defend what it considers its own backyard. Experts such as Justin Bronk from the Royal United Services Institute thinktank suggest the drone in the film could have been a commercially available Chinese-made model, the $9,500 (£8,030) Mugin-5, or a copy of it. It has a flight time of up to seven hours, the makers say, and a top speed of 150 km/h (95 mph) and could have been adapted to carry an improvised warhead. The payload, the manufacturers say, is 15 to 20 kg. The drone may also have been simply engaged in reconnaissance, although growing evidence of a drone project striking deep behind the front lines in Crimea and elsewhere suggests otherwise. Russia said the same naval base was hit by a drone attack in late July, injuring five people, making it all the more remarkable that defenses had not been beefed up. A video, sourced by a Russian military blogger, showed a similar-looking aircraft being used in a kamikaze attack on an oil refinery in Novoshakhtinsk, inside Russian territory near Rostov, just across the border from occupied Donetsk. The resemblance is unlikely to be a coincidence. Archie Bland and Nimo Omer take you to the top stories and what they mean, free every weekday morning Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online advertising and content sponsored by external parties. For more information, see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and Google’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Ukraine still refuses to take official responsibility for such attacks, although it sometimes does so privately. Publicly, the country’s leaders prefer to make informative comments that are not always subtle. Take Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s statement overnight: “This year, one can literally feel in the air of Crimea that the occupation there is temporary and Ukraine is returning.” The suggestion is that Ukraine has developed a new method of attack, aimed at sowing “chaos within the Russian forces”, as Zelenskiy’s key adviser Mykhailo Podolyak told the Guardian last week. Some experts believe that drones operated by special forces were responsible for the dramatic attack on the Saky air base, where about nine fighter jets supporting the Russian Black Sea fleet were destroyed. In any case, such drone attacks will have a practical effect. The Institute for the Study of War said that “Russian occupation officials in Crimea are likely considering beefing up security on the peninsula” and that “such measures could take Russian security forces away from the front lines.” But the crucial point is the psychological impact. Repeatedly captured on video, they demonstrate that Crimea and similar locations behind the lines are not safe, bringing the conflict closer to Russia and the occupied territories, while focusing (at least so far) on military and industrial targets. A series of social media videos show traffic jams on roads outside the Crimean peninsula, including at least one released on Saturday, suggesting that Russians who moved into the region after occupying and annexing it in 2014 no longer consider it safe. Others show traffic jams from Sevastopol to Yalta. If this is the result of a handful of drone strikes, Ukraine will consider the effort justified. No wonder Razvozhaev told the Russians in Sevastopol that it was time to fight the propaganda war better, as he called on everyone to keep calm because the local air defense system is now operational. “Upload videos of the work of our air defense systems,” he said.
