Deception Revealed: How Russians Were Going To Use ‘Konstantin Olshansky’ Ship

Did the Black Sea Fleet command want to deceive the Kremlin?

In Russia, they wanted to use the captured Ukrainian large landing ship "Konstantin Olshansky", which the Ukrainian Armed Forces hit with “Neptune”, for falsification, namely: to repair and rename it, passing it off as one of the damaged Russian landing ships, FREEDOM reports with reference to the speaker of the Ukrainian Navy Dmytro Pletenchuk.

It is known that the Ukrainian ship “Konstantin Olshansky” was captured by the Russian military in March 2014, after which its propulsion system and electronic equipment were disabled. In the autumn of the same year, this ship was transferred to the bay of Sevastopol.

In 2015, representatives of the Russian Federation declared their readiness to return “Konstantin Olshansky” to Ukraine, while openly manipulating and calling it “a condition for achieving peace in the Donbas.” Despite Kyiv’s steps to achieve the implementation of the Minsk agreements, this ship was never returned to Ukraine, but at the same time was not officially introduced into the Russian Black Sea Fleet.

“For nine years, “Konstantin Olshansky” was in the Sevastopol Bay, where the Russians dismantled it for spare parts and simply robbed it. And in the tenth year of the war, they realized that they were running out of large landing ships of this project 775, and decided to restore it. Within a year, the ship was docked and restoration work was carried out,” Pletenchuk noted.

According to the speaker, the purpose of these actions by the Russians was to make a falsification in order to report to the Moscow leadership about how they restored one of supposedly “their” large landing ships.

“It could be “Minsk” or “Olenegorsky Gornyak”, because the nature of the damage there is such that their restoration is a big question. And the following idea appeared: to pass off our ship as one of the Russian large landing ships,” Pletenchuk said.