Turned In By Their Own: Unexpected Details Of AFU Strike On 'Cyclone' Become Known

Destroying the ship could have been favourable to some Russian officials.

Dmytro Pletenchuk, the speaker of the Ukrainian Armed Forces Navy, suggested that the Russians could have deliberately put the Cyclone missile carrier of the 22800 Karakurt project under fire of the Defence Forces - the violations during its construction are not ruled out and someone in the Russian Federation is afraid of prison. According to Pletenchuk, this project is an old one, dating back to 1990.

"The ships themselves are new, but the project is old. The Russians had to return to it because in 2014 Ukraine imposed sanctions and stopped supplying gas turbine engines for a series of their frigates. And, by the way, that's why a Russian anti-submarine ship is burning in the Barents Sea right now - it just hasn't been properly maintained for ten years," the speaker said in an interview with RBC-Ukraine.

It was because of the lack of engines that the Russian Federation stopped building large ships. And, according to Pletenchuk, the Russians were even forced to sell several already built hulls of such vessels to India due to the lack of the specified "units", which were previously manufactured under the order of the Russian Federation in Ukraine. However, according to him, small missile ships could be built because they were completed with Russian engines that were manufactured at the Zvezda plant.

"Although they could make one such engine a year there. And subsequently they switched to Chinese-made engines anyway. As a consequence, the Russians returned to this project - 22800 Karakurt - because they needed to build five such ships for the Black Sea Fleet. And the Cyclone was the first to be built. It was finished two years ago and it has never been able to launch the Kalibr cruise missile, for which it was built," the military officer said.

In his opinion, the destruction of the Cyclone, which happened recently, could have been favourable to some Russian officials.

"I have the impression that the Russians put it there (in Crimea - ed.) on purpose so that somebody would not go to jail for the way this "Cyclone" was built. It failed to pass state tests in two years," the speaker suggested.

According to him, the Russians had four more ships of this project - Askold, which the Air Force destroyed in Kerch at the Zaliv plant, two more, which failed to pass the tests, have already moved from Novorossiysk to the Caspian Sea, one is still being built in Zelenodolsk (Tatarstan).

"This is how all these wonderful ships have left our water area," Pletenchuk stated.

According to him, the Russians have now withdrawn all missile carriers from occupied Crimea. He added that now the enemy is loading them in Novorossiysk, it is theoretically possible to do it in Crimea, but for this you have to enter the water area of the peninsula. This means a big risk for the occupiers, because the Ukrainian Defence Forces can hit enemy ships there at any moment.

"Most likely, they probably pulled the cranes from Crimea to Novorossiysk for the submarines. But they have a salvo of four, not eight missiles. And the effectiveness of using "Kalibrs" as a separate unit of armament is already in question," said the speaker.