Russian Missile Ship's Blueprints Emerge After Fiery Baltic Sea 'Sabotage'

Ukraine's Main Directorate of Intelligence (HUR) has released video of its claimed sabotage operation against a Russian missile corvette on Sunday in the Baltic Sea exclave of Kaliningrad, which the intelligence service said had "disabled" the vessel.

"Due to the fire inside the rocket ship, its means of communication and automation were completely destroyed," the HUR wrote alongside the video, which was posted to its official social media channels on Monday.

The footage purportedly showed a fire being set somewhere inside the Serpukhov Buyan-M class corvette, which is part of the Baltic Fleet and can be armed with either Kalibr or Oniks cruise missiles. The video also showed what were claimed to be blueprints of the vessel, presumably used by HUR operatives to plan the attack.

Newsweek cannot independently verify the footage and has contacted the Ukrainian and Russian defense ministries by email to request comment.

Buyan-M class vessels are designed to operate in the waters of relatively shallow coastal regions or inland waterways. The Serpukhov entered service in 2015, and was used to launch Kalibr missile strikes against Islamist militants in Syria from the Mediterranean Sea in 2016 as part of Moscow's intervention in the ruinous civil war there. The vessel was deployed to the Baltic Sea area later that year.

The claimed HUR attack took place while the ship was in the Baltic Fleet's home base of Baltiysk in the Kaliningrad region, located on the Vistula Spit, which juts out into the Baltic Sea and is bisected by the Russian-Polish border.

The extent of any damage done to the Serpukhov is not yet clear. Andrii Ryzhenko, a retired Ukrainian naval captain and now a strategic expert at the defense and logistics consultant company Sonata, told Newsweek that emerging reports suggest "serious damage" to the vessel.

The internal fire, he added, could have "completely destroyed" the corvette's communication systems and other vital equipment.

"It's possible to repair this ship, but it will take a significant amount of time," Ryzhenko said.

If the attack is confirmed, it would represent another embarrassing security lapse by the Russian navy. It has been repeatedly outmaneuvered by Ukrainian forces, in the Black Sea in particular, even though Kyiv has no conventional navy of note. Instead, Ukraine has used asymmetric warfare and long-range strikes to inflict repeated losses on the once-feared Black Sea Fleet.

Ukraine claims to have sunk or disabled around one third of the Black Sea Fleet's pre-war vessels in just over two years of full-scale combat. Among the losses have been the Mosvka guided missile cruiser—which served as the fleet's flagship, the Rostov-na-Donu attack submarine, and multiple Ropucha-class landing ships.