Russian warships were still launching attacks on Ukraine following the claim from Kyiv that the commander of Moscow’s Black Sea Fleet was killed Friday, as President Volodymyr Zelensky praised the arrival of US Abrams tanks to the country.
A spokesperson for the Ukrainian Navy said on national television Monday that while Russia was still launching strikes from the Black Sea, he compared the operations to “a chicken running around without a head.”
“At this moment, they (the Russian Navy) lost the person who actually manages all of this, and his staff, who manages the fleet together with him. This is a large grouping that requires a great number of managers to run all the processes to make it (the fleet) work as a single mechanism. Imagine that the core part of this mechanism becomes inoperable,” said Ukraine navy spokesperson Dmytro Pletenchuk.
Pletenchuk said Russian President Vladimir Putin “does not control the actual operation of ships at sea” and relies on his admirals who know “their means and forces, personnel, how to manage them, how to better deploy them.”
“Therefore, as of now, they will have respective problems with the control of the troops,” he said.
Pletenchuk’s comments came after the Ukrainian Special Operations Forces claimed Russian Adm. Viktor Sokolov, as well as 33 other officers, were killed in the attack on the Black Sea headquarters in Sevastopol Friday, in perhaps the boldest attack by Ukrainian forces on the occupied peninsula of Crimea so far.
