A Russian drone struck a Chinese-owned cargo ship in the Black Sea overnight as it approached Ukraine's Pivdennyi port, Ukrainian officials said Monday, one of two civilian vessels hit hours before President Vladimir Putin departs for a two-day state visit to Beijing.
The attack drags Putin's trip to see Chinese President Xi Jinping into the same maritime corridor Russia has been pounding for four years, and puts a Chinese crew and a Chinese-owned hull at the center of an incident Kyiv is pressing Beijing to answer for.
What was hit
Ukraine's seaports authority said two ships were struck overnight, one flying the flag of the Marshall Islands and the other of Guinea-Bissau. The Ukrainian navy identified the Marshall Islands-flagged vessel as the KSL Deyang, a Chinese-owned bulk carrier with an all-Chinese crew, and posted a photograph showing the ship's name with one side partially charred.
A source told Reuters the Deyang was without cargo at the time of the attack, heading to load iron ore concentrate at Pivdennyi in the Odesa region. Ukrainian navy spokesman Dmytro Pletenchuk told Agence France-Presse the crew handled the damage on their own and the ship continued to its destination.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in a post on social media, said "Drones struck Odesa and one of the UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] hit a vessel owned by China," adding: "The Russians could not have been unaware of what vessel was at sea." Zelenskyy said Russian forces had launched 524 attack drones and 22 ballistic and cruise missiles at Ukraine overnight.
The Beijing backdrop
The strike landed less than 24 hours before Putin's scheduled departure for Beijing. China has called for negotiations to end the war since Russia sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022 but has not condemned the invasion, and presents itself as a neutral party. Beijing did not publicly respond Monday morning. Russia has regularly attacked civilian ships and grain-handling infrastructure in the Odesa port area, which handles the bulk of Ukraine's agricultural exports.
The wider exchange
The Black Sea attack capped a weekend of mutual long-range strikes. A Ukrainian drone barrage on Sunday killed at least four people in Russia, including three in the Moscow region, and wounded a dozen others, local authorities said. A woman died in Khimki, just northwest of Moscow, and two men were killed in Pogorelki, about 10 kilometers, or 6 miles, north of the capital, regional Gov. Andrei Vorobyev said. A fourth man was killed when a drone hit a truck in the Belgorod region, local officials said.
Drone debris fell on the grounds of Sheremetyevo, Moscow's largest airport, without causing damage or disrupting flights. Russia's defense ministry said air defenses shot down or jammed more than 1,000 drones across the country in 24 hours, including 81 aimed at Moscow.
Zelenskyy called the strikes on Russia "entirely justified" and said the drones had flown more than 500 kilometers, or 310 miles, from Ukrainian territory. Nigel Gould Davies, senior fellow for Russia and Eurasia at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, told the Associated Press the operation appeared to be "the retaliation or revenge that President Zelenskyy promised after the fierce attacks that Russia carried out on Kyiv" at the end of a Victory Day pause on May 9.
The Russian view
Moscow has continued to frame its strikes on Ukrainian cities and ports as legitimate military targeting tied to the war it launched in 2022, and Russian officials over the weekend emphasized the scale of the inbound Ukrainian attack rather than the Black Sea strikes. Russian drone and missile attacks on Ukraine overnight into Sunday wounded eight people in the Dnipropetrovsk region, including three in Dnipro and four in Zelenskyy's hometown of Kryvyi Rih, Ukraine's state emergency service said.
Putin is scheduled to land in Beijing on Tuesday. Whether Xi raises the Deyang at their talks, and in what terms, will be the clearest near-term signal of how much daylight Beijing is willing to show with Moscow on the war.