KYIV, Ukraine -- Ukrainian anti-ship missiles and drones blitzed a major Russian naval base on the Black Sea coast in a “unique” nighttime operation, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Wednesday. Cutting-edge drones developed by Kyiv since Moscow’s full-scale invasion over four years ago have repeatedly targeted Russian ships in the Black Sea, including warships and oil tankers. Ukraine’s air and sea drones have succeeded in limiting the movements of Russia’s once-dominant Black Sea navy, Kyiv officials say, in one of the country’s biggest accomplishments of the war. But Ukrainian officials believe Russian President Vladimir Putin is bent on pressing ahead with the war, despite his bigger army’s slow and costly progress on the battlefield and U.S. diplomatic efforts to find a settlement. Putin is planning “an additional rapid mobilization of several hundred thousand Russians by the end of the year,” Zelenskyy said Tuesday night on social media, citing Ukrainian intelligence reports. Those reports have said recently that Russia is expanding production of ballistic missiles and jet-powered drones, both of which are hard for Ukrainian air defences to counter. Ukraine also is trying to scale up its weapons manufacturing through agreements with partner countries. Russia shows no sign of a new mobilization Neither Putin nor other senior Russian officials have hinted at a possible major call-up of forces to fight in Ukraine. Some officials have accused Kyiv of trying to rattle the Russian public with talk of a mobilization. Russian lawmaker Andrei Gurulyov brushed off reports of a possible autumn mobilization. “It is the enemy deliberately spreading rumors about mobilization in order to destabilize the situation inside Russia,” he was quoted as saying by pro-Kremlin online outlet Tsargrad in comments published Monday. After the widely unpopular partial mobilization of some 300,000 men four years ago, Russia has relied on volunteers attracted by relatively high pay. However, the decree declaring the partial mobilization that Putin signed in September 2022 is open-ended, allowing authorities to resume it if needed. Ukraine says it hit Black Sea port infrastructure The Ukrainian military “carried out a unique operation targeting the naval base in Novorossiysk -- the last major stronghold of the Russian fleet in the Black Sea,” Zelenskyy said in a social media post Wednesday. The attack struck air defences, piers and other port infrastructure, he added. Russia relocated most of its naval ships to Novorossiysk after Ukrainian strikes on the main Black Sea base at Sevastopol on the Crimean Peninsula earlier in the war. Hundreds of Ukrainian drones attacked Novorossiysk, Anapa and Gelendzhik and the Temryuk district of the Krasnodar region overnight, said Gov. Veniamin Kondratyev. An eight-year-old child was one of three people killed in the attack on the region, Kondratyev said. He added that 24 others in the region were wounded. Dozens of residential buildings were damaged, Kondratyev said, and debris from downed drones fell on the grounds of four industrial plants. The strikes damaged two of Novorossiysk’s three grain terminals, with one of them halting operations, the Russian business daily Vedomosti reported. Russia’s Defence Ministry said its air defenses downed more than 500 Ukrainian drones. Struck Russian port is also a key oil hub Novorossiysk also is home to the Grushovaya oil terminal, one of largest international hubs in southern Russia for petroleum products. No reports indicated it had been hit. In February, the U.S. State Department expressed its displeasure about Ukraine’s attacks on Novorossiysk, saying they affected U.S. oil interests in Kazakhstan. The Caspian Pipeline Consortium operates a pipeline from the Caspian coast in northwestern Kazakhstan to Novorossiysk. The pipeline handles much of the crude exports from three major Kazakh fields in which major U.S. energy companies, Chevron and ExxonMobil, have stakes. With the militaries of European countries boarding and detaining sanctioned Russian oil tankers at sea, hurting the country’s trade and heaping economic pressure on Moscow, Putin on Wednesday threatened retaliation for what he termed “piracy.” Speaking on a visit to a Russian warship taking part in a naval exercise in the Pacific, Putin said Western countries are breaking international maritime law by seizing ships they say are part of Moscow’s " shadow fleet " of sanctions-dodging merchant vessels. “It’s nothing but piracy and robbery,” Putin said. “If this is done, we will be forced to respond in kind.” On the Crimean Peninsula, which was illegally annexed by Moscow in 2014, air defences downed 115 Ukrainian drones over Sevastopol overnight, said Mikhail Razvozhayev, the city’s Russian-installed head. He added that 10 apartment buildings and 25 private houses were damaged. Russian drones kill 2 and destroy a shopping mall in Ukraine Ukraine’s air force said Russia fired 138 long-range drones as well as an unspecified number of missiles during the night, with damage recorded at 16 locations. In the Kherson region of southern Ukraine, a large-scale Russian drone attack overnight killed two people and wounded two others, said regional head Oleksandr Prokudin. The attacks also destroyed a shopping mall in the southern city of Zaporizhzhia, according to authorities. ------ By Illia Novikov
