Ukraine targets Crimea for 2nd day in a row: report

The air attack on Saturday was the second in two days as Kyiv increasingly takes aim at the region in an effort to disrupt Moscow’s military operations, New York Times reported.

Mikhail Razvozhayev, the governor of Sevastopol, Crimea’s largest city and the home of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, said that air defenses had been activated in the area and that debris from a downed rocket fell in the bay. The local authorities issued several warnings about possible air assaults on Saturday morning, urging residents to stay calm and seek shelter.

Saturday’s attack, which was not immediately confirmed by Ukraine’s military, came a day after Ukrainian forces launched a missile strike that damaged the Black Sea Fleet’s headquarters. Russia’s Defense Ministry said that a serviceman was missing after that attack.

The back-to-back assaults on Crimea, which the Kremlin annexed in 2014, are part of a Ukrainian campaign to hit deep behind Russian lines in an effort to sever Moscow’s battlefield supply chain and undermine Russia’s ability to hit Ukrainian territory from afar. In recent weeks, Ukraine has sharply accelerated the pace of strikes on the peninsula, hitting air-defense systems, a submarine and a command post.

TM/PR