Ukraine strikes psychological blows in game of drones over Crimea | Ukraine

For the second time in less than a month, Russia’s naval base at Sevastopol has come under a drone attack. Plumes of smoke were seen rising after the incident on Saturday morning, which the Russian-appointed governor of the city, Mikhail Razvozhaev, said came after a drone flew over the sensitive military site.

In narrow military terms the attack is not significant. Razvozhaev said it involved a single drone. Footage from a local Telegram channel appears to back that up. But a key question is how a drone was able to evade Russian electronic warfare defences and fly right over the naval base.

What sounds like small arms fire, not air defence systems, can be heard on some of the videos and the drone may have been shot down before delivering a payload. Razvozhaev said initially the drone had not been hit, before saying it was. At the very least, though, it is embarrassing for Russia, which is struggling to show it can defend what it considers its own back yard.

Experts such as Justin Bronk from the Royal United Services Institute thinktank suggest the drone in the film could have been a commercially available Chinese-made model, the $9,500 (£8,030) Mugin-5, or a copy of it. It has a flying time of up to seven hours, the manufacturers say, and a top speed of 150 km/h (95mph) and could have been adapted to carry an improvised warhead. The payload, the manufacturers say, is 15 to 20 kilograms.

The drone may also have been simply engaged in reconnaissance, although the growing evidence of a pattern of drone strikes deep behind the frontline in Crimea and elsewhere suggests something different. Russia said the same naval base was hit by a drone strike at the end of July, wounding five people, making the fact that defences were not tightened all the more remarkable.

A video, originally from a Russian military blogger, showed a similar-looking aircraft being used in a kamikaze strike on an oil refinery at Novoshakhtinsk, inside Russian territory near Rostov, just across the border from occupied Donetsk. The similarity is unlikely to be a coincidence.