On Monday evening, Russian Defense said it had “thwarted” a Ukrainian drone attack, neutralizing two aircraft that crashed in the Black Sea, “40 km northwest” of the peninsula. Buildings of the Russian fleet had been targeted on their side Thursday evening by a Ukrainian attack carried out with a naval drone while they controlled navigation in the Black Sea, said the Russian defense. The drone had been “destroyed” by fire from military ships without reaching its target, according to Moscow.

Protect grain ships

In parallel, on Thursday, the first ship to leave Ukraine after the end of the grain agreement arrived in Istanbul, despite the Russian blockade, without coming under fire. The container ship Joseph Schulte, flying the flag of Hong Kong, had left the port of Odessa on Wednesday and borrowed “a new humanitarian corridor”, established by Kiev to maintain the export of cereals, along the western coast of the Black Sea , near Romania and Bulgaria.
“Only one commercial vessel has passed so far. This showed that the cargo ships were ready to take alternative corridors,” Denis Marchuk, deputy director of the Agrarian Council, Ukraine’s largest agro-industrial group, has since told national television. “There should be a movement of seven to eight additional ships (…) and perhaps, then, these alternative routes will become an export corridor for agricultural products”, he added in his shared intervention. by Reuters.