Ukraine says it has launched a cruise-missile strike that disabled Russia’s flagship Black Sea vessel amid expectations Moscow is shifting its focus in the war to the east as fierce fighting continues to batter the port city of Mariupol, where the defenders were still holding out.
Russia’s Defense Ministry said on April 14 that a fire on the Moskva missile cruiser caused ammunition to blow up, but Maksym Marchenko, the Ukrainian governor of the region around the Black Sea port of Odesa, said the ship had been hit by two Ukrainian-made Neptune anti-ship cruise missiles.
“Neptune missiles guarding the Black Sea caused very serious damage,” he wrote in a post on Telegram as the war launched by Russia entered its 50th day.
Ukrainian presidential adviser Oleksiy Arestovych said that “a surprise happened” with the Moskva, which was considered a key piece in any plans Russia may have had to launch an amphibious attack on Odesa.
Russia’s Defense Ministry said the fire had been extinguished and the vessel “remains afloat” with its “main missile armaments” unharmed.
There was no immediate reaction from Ukraine’s Defense Ministry but Russia said it had evacuated the ship’s crew.
Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby said the United States does not have enough information now to confirm what caused the explosion on the Moskva.
“We’ve seen the social media reports that this was maybe a Ukrainian coastal defense missile (that) hit it. We can’t rule that out, we just don’t have enough information right now,” Kirby said in an interview on MSNBC.
In nearby Mariupol, heavy fighting was reported as Russia tries to seize full control of the strategic city, which if true would be the first city Moscow has been able to capture since it launched the war on February 24.
Russia has said that more 1,000 Ukrainian marines surrendered over the past 36 hours, but Ukrainian military officials have not confirmed the reports, saying only that Ukrainian forces were joining up in the city to continue defending it.
Mariupol has emerged as a key battleground as it would give Russia a land corridor between separatist-held eastern areas and the Crimea region it seized and annexed in 2014. It would also free up troops engaged there to help in a wider assault in the south and east of Ukraine.
As the fighting raged, Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said nine humanitarian corridors had been agreed upon with Russia to allow for the evacuation of civilians from several cities, including Mariupol, on April 14
The UN refugee agency said that almost 5 million Ukrainians have fled their country in the 50 days since Russia launched an unprovoked invasion of the country in the largest influx of refugees in Europe since World War II.
Vereshchuk also said that a new prisoner swap had been agreed with Russia and that, in total, 30 Ukrainians would be going home on April 14.
She added that the 30 Ukrainians included five officers and 17 soldiers, plus eight civilians.
Earlier, the Defense Ministry announced that two military pilots captured by Moscow’s forces last month and held in Russia had been released, without giving details of their return.
The statement identified the men as Ivan Pepelyashko and Oleksiy Chyzh and said they had been captured in early March in a village in Ukraine’s northern Chernihiv region.
It was not immediately clear whether the pilots were part of the exchange announced by Vereshchuk.
Thousands of civilians are thought to have been killed in Mariupol and officials say tens of thousands are still trapped in the city with little food or water after weeks of fierce fighting.
The UN refugee agency said on April 14 that almost 5 million Ukrainians have fled their country in the 50 days since Russia invaded, in the largest refugee flood in Europe since World War II.
New statistics published by the UNHCR show that 4,736,471 Ukrainians have fled the country because of the war, up by 79,962 from the previous day.
The UN said 90 percent of those who have fled are women and children, as the authorities in Kyiv have not allowed men of military age to leave the country.
The UN said on April 5 that about 7.1 million people had been displaced within Ukraine because of the war.
Poland, which has taken in an estimated 2.69 million refugees, was the main destination for those crossing the border. Romania was next with an estimated 716,797 refugees entering its territory.
Russia’s war on Ukraine has been widely criticized, with the international community imposing crippling sanctions on Moscow while at the same time isolating it diplomatically.
Irish Foreign Minister Simon Coveney was visiting Kyiv on April 14 to focus on how it can continue to provide political, security and humanitarian support to Ukraine, assist Kyiv in its application for European Union candidate status, take forward further EU sanctions on Russia, and “hold Russia to account for its brutal and unjustified invasion.”
The war has also raised security concerns in other countries in Europe, with Sweden and Finland saying on April 13 that it could be only a matter of weeks before they apply to join the NATO security alliance.
Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council and one of President Vladimir Putin’s closest allies, warned on April 14 that such a move by the two Nordic countries would end the concept of a “nuclear-free” Baltic region.
The Moskva gained notoriety early in the war when it called on Ukrainian border troops defending the strategic Snake Island to surrender, only to be defiantly refused.
It was previously deployed in the Syria conflict where it served as naval protection for the Russian forces’ Khmeimim airbase.
The Moskva is the second major ship known to have suffered serious damage since the start of the war. Last month, Ukraine said it had destroyed a landing support ship, the Orsk, on the smaller Sea of Azov.
