Crimea Videos Show 30-Foot Waves Pounding Russia-Occupied Peninsula

Hurricane-force winds and 30-foot waves pounded annexed Crimea in a major Black Sea storm on Sunday that left one man dead, several others injured and half a million people without power.

Oleg Kryuchkov, an official in the Moscow-installed administration in Crimea, said that the victim had ventured from his home in the village of Morskoye to "look at the waves." The stormy weather was expected to continue on Monday.

Crimea was annexed by Russian President Vladimir Putin from Ukraine in 2014, a move that hasn't been recognized internationally. Ukraine has vowed to recapture the peninsula, and has been ramping up attacks on military targets there, the Kerch Strait bridge that links Crimea to Russia's mainland, as well as Putin's prized Black Sea Fleet.

Videos circulating on Telegram showed huge waves battering the coastline, causing destruction in their path. Other footage of the storm showed trees being downed by the wind. Telegram channel ASTRA reported that the bad weather is also expected to hit other regions in Russia, and that in the Krasnodar Territory, "the wind is already tearing roofs off buildings."

Newsweek has contacted Russia's foreign ministry via email for comment

Many villages in the annexed Black Sea peninsula are now without power, multiple trees have been knocked down, roofs have been torn off, and gas pipelines are damaged, and Monday has been declared a non-working day due to the weather, Russian state-run media reported Monday.

The news that one person had been killed during the storm followed a report of a missing person in Crimea. Seven were injured, and three of them were hospitalized, in Sevastopol.

Kryuchkov said in a post on his Telegram channel that the worst-affected areas are Chornomorsk, Saky, Bilohirsk, Simferopol, Zhovtneve, Bakhchysarai and Lenine.

Ukrainian officials reported that Russian coastal defense lines had been destroyed during the storm.

"A storm washed away trenches in occupied Crimea that [the] Russian army dug out on the beaches," Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to the Ukrainian minister of internal affairs, wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter. "According to information from Crimean media, in Yevpatoria, the water washed away the defense line on the coast, engineering buildings, and firing positions."

In another post, author and defense analyst H I Sutton shared an image from one of the clips posted by Gerashchenko in which a Russian coastal defense line is seen being battered by waves, alongside an image of one of the lines being constructed for comparison, Newsweek previously reported.

"How it started. How it's going," Sutton wrote. "[Russian] beach defenses in Crimea being hit hard by the storm, possibly much washed away. (Photos not exact same location, but good indication what to expect.)"

A yellow terror threat level has been in place in parts of the peninsula since April 11, 2022, weeks after Putin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine began. Russian forces began fortifying the area amid fears of a Ukrainian advance earlier this year.

The Washington Post published satellite imagery from Maxar, a space solutions company, that shows Russian forces building an extensive web of defense fortifications on the Black Sea peninsula and along its approaches from occupied southern Ukraine. Al Jazeera also published satellite images that show the reinforcement of the defenses around the Sevastopol naval base.

Do you have a tip on a world news story that Newsweek should be covering? Do you have a question about the Russia-Ukraine war? Let us know via worldnews@newsweek.com.