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‘An attack on enemy’s imperial ambitions': Ukraine on Moskva ship ‘strike’
Russia-Ukraine war: The Ukrainian army, however, also acknowledged that the offensive will lead to Russia taking revenge for the attack.
Ukraine on Friday talked up what it says was its strike on Russia’s Moskva warship, though it also said it knows that the offensive will lead to Russia taking revenge for the attack. “The Moskva cruiser strike hit not only the ship itself; it hit the enemy’s imperial ambitions. We are all aware that we will not be forgiven for this,” said Natalia Gumeniuk, a spokeswoman for Ukraine’s southern military forces.
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“We are aware that the attacks against us will intensify and that the enemy will take revenge,” Gumeniuk further said, as Moscow warned it will intensify its attacks on Ukrainian capital Kyiv in response to what it claimed was Ukraine targeting Russia’s border towns.
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Meanwhile, speaking further about the operation, Gumeniuk remarked that even the ‘forces of nature’ were on her country’s side. “We saw that the other ships tried to assist Moskva. However, the storm made both the rescue operation and crew evacuations impossible,” she said.
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Moskva, which was the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea fleet and was leading the country’s naval operations against the east European nation, was damaged by an explosion on Wednesday, and sank a day later. While Moscow attributed the blast on the vessel to an explosion of the ship’s ammunition, Kyiv said the blast was due to a strike it carried out using the domestic Neptune cruise missiles.
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Russia launched invasion of its neighbour on February 24. In the words of President Vladimir Putin, the offensive is a ‘special military operation’ aimed at ‘de-nazifying’ Ukraine.
(With AFP inputs)
