Since 2014, no Ukrainian soldier had set foot on the Crimean peninsula again. Nine years later, on a nighttime mission, a group of 10 Ukrainian soldiers, arriving on four speedboats, stormed the Olenivka beach, on the Mayak coast, its westernmost tip. It is an important military complex where cruise missiles and Shaeed drones are launched towards Ukraine, in addition to keeping a complex of radars and a very expensive S400 anti-aircraft battery that was blown up by Kiev the day before.
Hundreds of Russian soldiers also rest in that place inside summer cabins designed for tourism. The Ukrainians, some members of the Special Forces and others from the secret service (SBU) put up a Ukrainian flag and placed explosives in the bedrooms of the occupying soldiers. Under the dead of night, the compound’s guards did not notice the Ukrainians’ presence until they were returning to the boats, at which point a firefight broke out, waking the garrison.
There are several videos of the raid. They had arrived in four speedboats from the coast of Mikolaiv or Odesa, about two hours away. In one of them you can see a group of soldiers hoisting a Ukrainian flag in whispers, in another you can see the same components of the commando whistling in the boats as they move away from the coast (and explosions begin to be seen on the beach) and some another with the Ukrainians themselves firing their weapons when embarking again.
Kiril Budanov himself, head of Ukrainian Intelligence and a great supporter of this type of daring missions, has finished off the matter in his cryptic way: «We can attack whenever and wherever we want, anywhere in Crimea. Those who have done stupid things, they better go.”
Several Russian military bloggers acknowledge the raid but disagree on the outcome. For some, Russia managed to repel the attack by killing all the members of the command. For others, it turned out the other way around. The videos, in any case, show the Ukrainians returning to their point of departure proudly and without apparent casualties. Whether or not there are dead among the Russian soldiers resting in the center, it will be a matter of time before that information comes to light.
The attack, clearly British-inspired, copies the style of the old SAS, that combat unit that infiltrated the Libyan desert behind enemy lines and was capable of destroying dozens of Luftwaffe fighters on the ground, breaking in at night with weapons and explosives. Ukraine has learned to carry out such missions to the other bank of the Dnipro River, where Russian troops remain, and all that experience can now be used to land and carry out raids in occupied Crimea.
These kinds of missions have a more psychological effect than a military one, but they force the Russians to use more means to defend their entire coast if they do not want to prevent this type of attack from going further. With this incursion, Russia completes 24 black hours (with the death of Prigozhin and the Ukrainian liberation of Robotine) in an invasion that is leaking from February 24, 2022.