An air alert was declared on Thursday in the Sevastopol district of Crimea, where several “air targets” were shot down, governor Mykhailo Razvyvaev said, News.ro reports.

A view of the Crimean Bridge from afarPhoto: Kostyantyn Mikhalchevsky / Sputnik / Profimedia

“Rescue services of Sevastopol currently do not record damage to the infrastructure,” he wrote in Telegram, adding that the military “is working to destroy a large number of targets.”

According to the Telegram channel “Winds of Crimea”, eyewitnesses reported a strong explosion in Yevpatoria, at the other end of the Sevastopol Bay, and the local channel “TPP/Sevastopol” reported ten rocket hits.

The Russian news agency TASS, with reference to the Traffic Information Center, previously reported on the suspension of traffic on the Crimean Bridge, which connects the Ukrainian peninsula annexed by Moscow in 2014 with Russia.

The Russian Ministry of Defense, for its part, said on Thursday that its forces “thwarted” a Ukrainian attack on Russian facilities in Crimea and destroyed 10 Ukrainian missiles over the peninsula, writes Le Guardian.

During the 22-month war, Ukraine carried out a series of attacks on Crimea and the bridge connecting it to Russia.

In October 2022, SBU naval drones attacked Sevastopol Bay, damaging four Russian warships. In 2023, drones hit two missile carriers, an oil tanker, an amphibious assault ship, and damaged a large military tugboat and the newest Russian reconnaissance ship. These attacks forced Moscow to move a large part of its fleet from its base in the port of Sevastopol, leaving the western sea free of Russian ships and thus allowing Ukraine to resume the use of its ports for shipping.

At the end of last year, on Christmas Day, Ukraine managed to carry out a spectacular operation, destroying the Russian amphibious assault ship “Novocherkask” in the port of Feodosia in Crimea. Russia claimed that the ship was damaged, but the British Defense Secretary said that in fact the ship was completely destroyed and Russia is trying to embellish the reality.

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