Ukraine for the first time struck a target in Russia’s Dagestan region on Wednesday, according to local and Ukrainian officials, eyewitnesses, and Russian and Ukrainian media. The military port at Kaspiysk on the Caspian Sea was attacked by Ukrainian drones about 670 miles from the front lines.
It is home to the Russian Navy’s Caspian Flotilla and coastal troops, including marine forces, according to the independent Russian Astra media outlet. “The flotilla has conducted missile strikes on Ukraine, and the 177th Marine Regiment has participated in combat operations in the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions,” the publication noted.
While both sides agree the port was attacked, the results are in dispute. Ukrainian sources say at least one Russian vessel was damaged while Russians claim all the drones were shot down before any ships were hit, but resulting shrapnel injured a teenager.
“For the first time during the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a drone struck ships of the Caspian flotilla of the Russian Navy,” Alexander Kovalenko, the head of Countering Disinformation under Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, stated on Telegram. “Later, the media reported that in Kaspiysk, as a result of the strike, the combat ships of Project 11661 class ships Tatarstan and Dagestan were damaged.”
The head of the Dagestan regional government had a different take.
“This morning, air defense forces destroyed an unmanned aerial vehicle over the Caspian Sea,” Sergei Melikov said on Telegram.
Video emerging from the scene indicates that neither point of view is fully accurate.
One video shows a drone, which appears to be a Ukrainian-made Aeroprakt A-22 ultralight aircraft converted into a one-way attack drone, flying through the continuous crackle of air defenses, eventually exploding on impact among the vessels. Kovalenko claims the video shows the drone striking near “the mooring zone of a small missile boat of Project 21631 and a missile boat of Project 12418, the only representative of which in the Caspian flotilla is Stupinets.”
However, it is hard to determine from the quality of the video if any ships were directly hit or suffered any damage.
“As far as I can see in the video, the decommissioned Tarantula class Stupinets corvette was not hit by a Ukrainian drone,” a retired Russian Navy officer who uses @Capt_Navy Twitter handle told The War Zone. “In any case, the ship has already been withdrawn from the flotilla, decommissioned in 2023.”
Other videos, shot from different angles and further away, show the drone crashing in a ball of flames but with no apparent secondary explosions indicating a strike on munitions or fuel supplies.
The following video shows Russians running from the explosion.
Low-resolution satellite imagery collected after the attack does not appear to show much, if any damage to the port or ships, according to an open-source investigator who uses the @MT_Anderson Twitter handle. The satellite image, he added, also shows most of the vessels had been dispersed from the port at the time the image was taken.
In addition to the port being hit, the nearby Makhachkala airport temporarily suspended operations due to the drone attack, Astra reported.
Regardless of the outcome, the attack is significant in several ways.
As we have noted in the past, Iran has used the Caspian Sea and its ports to ship missiles and other weapons to Russia in large measure because that route has been considered safe from Ukrainian attacks. In addition, this marks a new targeting of the Russian Navy. In June, they began launching Kalibr long-range cruise missiles from the Sea of Azov instead of the Black Sea. That’s because it became more dangerous for them launching from the western Black Sea after repeated attacks by Ukrainian missiles and aerial and sea drones.
“Kaspiysk is more than a thousand kilometers away from the probable launch site and the drone, which is an adapted light aircraft, covered this distance without any problems, and in daylight!” Kovalenko noted. “Hundreds of kilometers through Russian echeloned air defense, not a small-sized, compact object, but a light aircraft!”
“Yes,” he added, “this is the first strike on the Russians in the Caspian Sea during the entire period of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which clearly hints – sailors, you will not have peace in either the Black Sea or the Caspian!”
The inability of Russian air defenses to spot drones before flying over the port was not lost on one influential Russian Telegram channel.
“There were reports that the enemy did not achieve its targets with its morning attack,” the Two Majors Telegram channel said. “However, we cannot bring ourselves to call the air defense system at the naval base effective. The enemy crashed his drone into the port not because his drone was new, super-maneuverable or armored. No, it’s just that bureaucracy and the speed of decision-making do not allow even proactive officers (especially in the Navy) to change anything on their own.”
This is just the latest in Ukraine’s long-range drone strikes on Russian targets. Given the importance of the Caspian Sea to Moscow’s war effort, there will likely be more.
Contact the author: howard@thewarzone.com