KYIV, Ukraine — As Russia warned Finland and Sweden against joining NATO, its military was dealt a serious loss with the sinking of its flagship in the Black Sea.
Ukrainian officials in the port city of Odesa reported overnight that a Neptune missile had been launched at the Russian ship, the Moskva, which has been part of the naval campaign against Ukraine. There were conflicting reports as to whether one or two missiles were fired at the ship.
Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby said he could not confirm that a Ukrainian missile struck the ship, only that there had been an explosion on board that caused a fire, “which as of this morning was still raging.”
The Russian Defense Ministry, which had acknowledged the fire but did not provide a cause, later reported that the ship sank while being towed in a storm, according to Russian state run media.
The sinking of the Moskva is a major blow for the Russian fleet and a tactical and public relations coup for Ukraine at a pivotal moment — when the country is bracing for a massive Russian offensive in the eastern and southern regions.
Ukrainian officials said the Moskva, which reportedly carried an array of missiles, torpedoes, mines and other weaponry, had a crew of 510. It had previously been deployed in the Mediterranean off the coast of Syria, where Russia has aided the government of Bashar Assad against Western-backed rebels.
The Moskva was also involved in one of the signature confrontations in the early stages of the war. The ship’s crew demanded the surrender of a Ukrainian military unit posted on Snake Island, a Ukrainian island in the Black Sea. The Ukrainians are said to have answered the Russians with a defiant refusal punctuated with profanity.
Snake Island’s defenders were taken prisoner by the Russians but later released in a prisoner exchange. Their adamant refusal to give in has become a kind of motto of Ukrainian resistance, even commemorated in a postage stamp.
Meanwhile, Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chair of Russia’s Security Council, warned on the messaging app Telegram that Russia’s military would “more than double” its forces in Russia’s Western flank if Sweden and Finland join NATO.
Ground forces would be increased, he wrote, and Russia would deploy “significant naval forces” — with nuclear capability — in the Gulf of Finland.
He was responding to a news conference a day earlier in which Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin and Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson expressed a deeper interest in NATO since Russia invaded Ukraine.
“I think people’s mind-sets in Finland, also in Sweden, changed and (were) shaped very dramatically because of Russia’s actions,” Marin said.
Meanwhile, U.S. officials raced to get a bulk of the $800 million in aid to Ukraine in preparation for the widely expected battle in the country’s eastern region.
Kirby said that the Pentagon is “mindful of the clock” as it transfers the latest security assistance to Ukraine and trains Ukrainians to use new equipment.
“We have not seen any Russian efforts to interdict that flow,” he said. “Flights are still going in to tranche shipment sites in the region, and ground movement is still occurring of this material inside Ukraine every single day. There are security assistance weapons, and material and support equipment that is getting into Ukraine.”
Elsewhere, fighting continued to rage Thursday in Mariupol, a once-thriving port city that in prewar days had a population of more than 400,000. It is now home to fewer than 100,000 residents, who lack food, water, electricity and heat, authorities say. Fleeing the area would involve a perilous run through a gantlet of shelling, gunfire and checkpoints of two rival armies.
Russia repeatedly has said the city is under its control, but Ukrainian officials say its forces continue to resist.
On a rainy, dreary morning in eastern Ukraine, an intermittent trickle of people arrived Thursday at the Kramatorsk central bus station, dragging what little luggage they could carry to a pair of buses headed west.
The pace of evacuations had spiked last week, after what was suspected to be a Russian Tochka-U missile armed with cluster bomblets struck the Kramatorsk train station, killing some 57 people and injuring more than 100 others.
Train service from Kramatorsk was suspended, but hundreds crowded into the bus station to evacuate. By Thursday morning barely a dozen more arrived to mount a tired-looking white bus run by volunteers with an “Evacuations” sign on the front.
Kramatorsk resident Oleksandr Ivanov, 38, with the Ukrainian aid group “Everything Will Be OK,” estimated that anywhere from 40,000 to 50,000 people remain in the city.
“They fall under three categories: Many don’t have money and can’t pay to stay somewhere else. Second are those whose family members are too old or too sick to move,” he said. “And perhaps a small part feel that even if Russia comes they’ll be fine.”
In recent days, Ukrainian authorities say, Russia also has relentlessly shelled Kharkiv, the country’s second-most populated city behind Kyiv. Much of the city’s population of 1.4 million has fled, and the remaining residents spend much of their time seeking refuge in an underground metro system.
Also Thursday, Russian forces again pounded cities and towns in eastern and southern Ukraine in advance of what is expected to be an all-out offensive in the country’s former industrial heartland, the eastern region known as the Donbas, which includes Mariupol. Satellite imagery and Pentagon observation have shown a growing buildup of Russian forces and heavy equipment — including helicopters and artillery — in various staging grounds.
“Russian troops are stepping up activity in the eastern and southern directions,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Wednesday. “New columns of equipment are being brought in. They are looking for reserves.”
In the east, Russian forces are fighting alongside battle-tested Ukrainian allies who know the terrain, an advantage Russia didn’t have during its failed assault on Kyiv that resulted in an ignominious retreat earlier this month. Two pro-Russian breakaway areas of the Donbas have been at war with Ukrainian government since 2014 in a brutal conflict that has resulted in the loss of thousands of lives.
As the showdown in the east nears, Western nations have been accelerating shipment of military supplies to Ukraine.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, who launched the invasion seven weeks ago, has since accused Washington of wanting to drag out the war in order to bleed his nation. And he asserts that U.S. efforts to bolster democracy in Ukraine and other former Soviet satellite states are meant to undermine Russian security.
“The United States is ready to fight with Russia until the last Ukrainian,” Putin said this week.
Moscow says the invasion, which Putin refers to as a “special military operation,” is designed to help shield Russia from Western encroachment and to demilitarize and “denazify” Ukraine. Ultraright nationalists, some with Nazi sympathies, have been part of the Ukrainian political panorama in recent years. But they play a minor role in the nation’s political and military or leadership.
Since the Russian retreat from Kyiv earlier this month, a steady flow of foreign leaders has been visiting the capital. That group expanded this week to include the presidents of neighboring Poland and the three Baltic states. They were taken to see first-hand one of the area’s worst-damaged towns, Borodyanka, where Russian shelling and bombardment destroyed a number of high-rise apartment buildings and other structures.
“This is not war, this is terrorism,” Polish President Andrzej Duda, accompanied by Zelenskyy and the leaders of the three Baltic states, said at a news conference in Kyiv earlier in the week.
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(Times staff writers McDonnell reported from Kyiv, Bulos from Kramatorsk and Kaur from Washington. Staff writer Kurtis Lee contributed to this report from Los Angeles.)
