The flagship of the Russian Black Fleet, Moskva, which sank on Thursday, was hit by a new type of Ukrainian missile, according to a senior US defense official who told reporters on Friday. Russia says Moskva was damaged by fire. A senior U.S. defense official said the ship had been hit by at least one Neptune rocket and that there were possible casualties – Russian authorities said the crew, believed to be about 500 sailors, had been evacuated when a fire broke out and caused ammunition to explode. The extent of the injuries and deaths is not known to the public. This would be the first known use of the Neptune missile system and Ukraine’s most significant naval strike in the war against Russia. The Neptune is the first home-made medium-range cruise missile for Ukraine, designed for use against warships such as the Moskva. This is an update to the Soviet-era KH-25 missile – which could only be fired from ships and planes – modified to be fired by truck launchers at land and sea targets. It has a range of about 200 miles and is designed primarily to target warships such as cruisers and destroyers. The final tests of Poseidon took place in late February, as war broke out, but Ukrainian officials were skeptical about the missile system’s readiness, according to a Wall Street Journal article. It was initially estimated that Poseidons would develop in coastal cities, such as Odessa, by April 2022. Russia has superior naval capabilities in the Black Sea, and officials hoped that Poseidon could level the playing field by increasing the cost to Russia of bombing Odessa and other vulnerable coastal cities. Andriy Zagorodnyuk, Ukraine’s former defense minister, told the Wall Street Journal that Poseidon was allowing Ukraine to “hit any target in our territorial waters.” “Essentially, this is the possibility of blocking the Russians’ capabilities if they try to attack,” Zagorodnyuk told the Wall Street Journal in February. The Moskva is the largest warship lost in battle since World War II. The closest ship to Moskva is the Argentine light cruiser General Belgrano, which was torpedoed by a Royal Navy submarine in 1982 during the Falklands War. On Thursday, the Russian Defense Ministry claimed that the flagship was still floating and that the cause of the fire “has not yet been determined”, according to the state news agency TASS. Questions remain about the sequence of events that sank the ship, with speculation that ammunition explosions may have broken the hull of the ship and led to flooding that the crew could not contain. Ukrainian Presidential Adviser Oleksiy Arestovich praised the Telegram strike on Thursday, calling it “an extremely important military event and the biggest defeat of the Russian navy since World War II.”
