At least eight Russian military aircraft appear to have been damaged or destroyed in the recent attack on the Saki Air Base in Crimea, according to recently released satellite images.
Kyiv said on Wednesday that nine Russian planes were destroyed on the ground after Tuesday’s dramatic explosions at the Saki air base, which Russia said killed one, injured 14 and damaged dozens of nearby houses.
Kyiv has so far officially denied responsibility for the attack, with presidential adviser Volodymyr Zelensky suggesting that guerrillas may have been involved.
Russia also tried to play down the attack, denying that any planes were damaged in the blasts and admitting only that “several aviation munitions detonated” in a storage area at the facility.
However, satellite images appear to show multiple fighter jets at the Novofedorovka military base blown up with new evidence suggesting the possibility of a targeted attack.
Images from the US-based Planet Labs show large areas of scorched earth and runway damage along with the charred wreckage of military aircraft.
Images taken by the private satellite operator at around 8am on August 9 – roughly four hours before the attack – and around 4.40pm on August 10 showed at least eight aircraft parked outside damaged or destroyed.
Saki Air Base before and after image Saki Air Base before and after image
The before-and-after images are the first independent confirmation of damage to the base, raising questions about how a site more than 100 miles (160 km) from the front line could have been attacked.
Elliott Higgins, founder and director of the open-source investigative website Bellingcat, said he “can’t think of a time when Russia has lost so many air assets in one day in recent memory” in a series of tweets Thursday.
Higgins also noted, “I can make out three craters in places that appear to have been used for storage, so they may have been targeted and everything else destroyed when whatever was stored there rose.”
“One way to interpret these craters are precision hits from long-range munitions,” he said, adding that the craters appeared to be “about 20-25 meters wide … which would indicate a fairly large munition.”
“One thing that stands out is that there are no visible impacts that look like misses, so either they used very accurate weapons or they were very lucky.”
British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace told the BBC that the UK was still trying to establish the facts about the explosions at the air base, but added that he thought it was unlikely that Western weapons were involved. The airbase, he claimed, was a legitimate target for Ukraine’s armed forces.
Political sources in Ukraine said the country carried out the attack, but Kyiv did not publicly claim responsibility.
The Saki airbase is home to Su-30M fighter jets, Su-24 bombers and an Il-76 transporter used regularly to launch missile strikes on Ukraine and patrol the Black Sea and surrounding areas.
Crimea is internationally recognized as part of Ukraine, but was seized by Moscow in 2014. It has huge strategic and symbolic importance for both countries. The Kremlin’s demand that Ukraine recognize Crimea as part of Russia was one of the key conditions for an end to the fighting, while Ukraine promised to expel the Russians from the peninsula and all other occupied territories.
An adviser to the Ukrainian president, Oleksiy Arestovych, said cryptically that the blasts were caused either by Ukrainian long-range weapons or the work of Ukrainian guerrillas operating in Crimea.
Ukrainian military analyst Oleg Zhdanov said: “Official Kyiv is silent on this, but unofficially the military admits that this is a Ukrainian strike.”
Ukraine’s public coyness over the attack is partly designed to preserve some ambiguity about the means used, sources said, sparking widespread speculation how Kyiv was able to strike so deep behind Russian lines, in one of the first attacks on Crimean soil since the Russian invasion began in February.
Justin Bronk, an aviation analyst at the Rusi think tank, said that after examining videos of the incident on social media, he could see no evidence of incoming missiles and that he was “almost certain” that there had been “secondary explosions” of ammunition depots or fuel bunkers that were stored on or near the runway.
Explosions at the Saki air base in Crimea send plumes of smoke into the sky – video
This led him to conclude that “the most likely current theory to me is that Ukrainian special forces carried out the attack by infiltrating close enough to the base to launch and target small UAVs [drones] or stray munitions to hit either parked aircraft or trucks/fuel depots”.
The Washington-based Institute for the Study of War said it could not independently determine what caused the explosions, but noted that the simultaneous blasts at two locations on the base probably ruled out an accidental fire, but not sabotage or a missile attack.
But it added: “The Kremlin has little incentive to blame Ukraine for carrying out the strikes that caused the damage, as such strikes would demonstrate the ineffectiveness of Russian air defense systems.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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