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A few well-placed bribes to cash-strapped Russian military officers reportedly played a part in a Ukrainian missile strike in Crimea on Friday that destroyed the headquarters of the Russian Black Sea Fleet and may have taken out yet another senior Russian commander in the process.
Russia on Monday refused to address Ukrainian claims that the missile strike, which hit a building in the occupied Crimean Peninsula, killed Russian Black Sea commander Adm. Viktor Sokolov and nearly three dozen aides. The admiral was appointed to the post in the wake of the disastrous sinking of the Russian navy’s Black Sea flagship Moskva in April 2022.
Officials with ATESH, a Ukrainian-Crimean Tatar partisan movement, said they paid Russian officers for information about the location of high-ranking military officials operating in the area. They told the Kyiv Post newspaper that Moscow is having problems paying salaries to its naval personnel in Sevastopol.
“The financial reward only helps them to decide on cooperation with the ATESH movement. It serves as an additional incentive,” the Kyiv Post reported on Monday.
Ukraine’s Special Operations Forces said on its Telegram messaging site that it had confirmed that Adm. Sokolov was among 35 Russian naval personnel who were killed in the attack while another 105 were wounded. Ukrainian media over the weekend published aerial footage of the strike, as British Storm Shadow missiles slammed into the roof of the naval headquarters in Sevastopol.
The Telegram post did not identify the admiral by name, however, and his death has yet to be confirmed by Russian officials. Media outlets in Moscow did not mention the fate of the admiral and claimed Monday that just one person had been killed in the raid.
Perhaps in retaliation, Russian forces fired a new salvo of missiles at Ukraine’s southern port of Odesa on Sunday night, destroying grain stores, the Ukrainian military said Monday.
Officials with the partisan group said the Russian officers they approached also believe their country is “waging a criminal war and that it needs to stop.” The information they provided gave the partisans, and Ukrainian officials back in Kyiv, access to the “general activities” of the Black Sea Fleet command, according to the Kyiv Post.
ATESH officials declined to say how much money changed hands but said it was enough to make the risks worthwhile for the Russian officers and their families.
Ukrainian officials said Friday’s strike was launched during a senior staff meeting inside the Black Sea Fleet headquarters building located in what it referred to as “temporary occupied Sevastopol.”
“The headquarters building cannot be restored,” they said on Telegram.
On Monday, retired U.S. Adm. James Stavridis, a former NATO commander, called the missile strike “a remarkable achievement” that eliminated a top Russian military official and several senior subordinates.
“I believe you have to go back to [World War II] to find another admiral killed in combat,” Adm. Stavridis posted on X.
The missile strike on the Black Sea Fleet headquarters came about a week after an attack that heavily damaged the landing ship “Minsk” and the diesel-electric submarine “Rostov-on-Don” while they were in dry dock in Sevastopol. A Ukrainian special forces team infiltrated the area and then began identifying targets, officials said. Ukrainian Air Force pilots launched British-supplied Storm Shadow missiles at the Russian warships.
“The group adjusted fire and confirmed the destruction of targets. After that, our warriors conducted a successful exfiltration,” Ukrainian officials said on Telegram.
On Monday, Ukrainian officials also confirmed that the first batch of U.S.-made M1 Abrams tanks has arrived in Ukraine and will soon provide Kyiv with greater combat power in its slow-building counteroffensive against dug-in Russian defensive lines in the south and east.
The Biden administration’s original plan was to ship Ukraine 31 of the newer M1A2 Abrams tanks, but it would have taken at least a year before they would have seen any action on the battlefield. Instead, officials in Washington opted to send Ukraine the older M1A1 version, which can be taken directly from U.S. stocks and upgraded for quicker deployment.
The Abrams will offer Ukraine greater mobility and firepower than the Soviet-era tanks in their arsenal. They will soon join the ranks of other main battle tanks provided by NATO countries such as the British Challenger and the German-made Leopard.
Amid complaints the offensive was bogging down, Kyiv’s forces over the past week have advanced into Russian-held territory in the Orikhiv and Bakhmut sectors in southern Ukraine. In both areas, they have defeated Russian counterattacks and maintained their hold on recently-liberated territory, British military officials said.
“Over the last nine months, the Russian force in Ukraine has proved itself capable of conducting stalwart defensive operations. However, it continues to display only minimal capability on the offensive,” British defense intelligence officials said in their latest assessment of the fighting.
• Mike Glenn can be reached at mglenn@washingtontimes.com.
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