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Satellite images have shown on Thursday the enormous damage caused by the Ukrainian attack on the Russian Saky airbase, on the occupied Crimean peninsula.

Morale in Ukraine is again very high.

The hit on the base, with several Russian planes destroyed,

joins the sinking of the cruiser

Moskva

as one of the boldest victories of the war

.

At least seven Russian fighters are seen burned and scattered

by several consecutive explosions

that devastated the base.

The Kremlin from the beginning assured that it had been an accident with the ammunition and that no plane had been affected.

As on previous occasions, Moscow wanted to play down the matter as if the satellites did not exist, but reality once again overrides its communications.

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Ukraine takes its secret war to occupied Crimea

  • Writing: ALBERTO ROJAS

Ukraine takes its secret war to occupied Crimea

Ukraine, which responded derisively to the attack, blaming the Russian military's penchant for smoking inside its magazines, said

Moscow had lost 10 fighter jets and killed 60 pilots in total

.

The nearby beaches and hotels, from where the Russian tourists took videos showing a consecutive series of explosions in adjoining places, have been left empty.

The traffic jam to flee the Crimean peninsula, illegally annexed by Russia in 2014,

was still tens of kilometers across the bridge that links the Kerch Strait.

It is becoming increasingly clear that this is a Ukrainian precision missile attack, although no one knows for sure what kind of ammunition Kiev uses

to hit targets so far away so deadly

.

Ukraine is using weapons that it claims it does not have, and that its allies admit they did not provide.

From the Ukrainian territory controlled by Kiev to the Saky air base

there are approximately 218 kilometers

.

That is, a considerable distance that rules out Himars rocket systems, at least with the ammunition supplied by the US so far, capable of reaching up to 80 kilometers.

There is a type of guided missile, the ATACMS, that could reach that target,

but Washington and London say they have not been supplied to Kiev

.

Could it be that the Ukraine has acquired this type of ammunition and is keeping it a secret?

It is an option that should not be ruled out.

The second goes through another missile system still in the testing phase, the Ukrainian Sapsan, which does have that range of action.

The third is that they used a Neptune-type anti-ship missile,

the same one that was used to sink the

Moskva

, in a land attack.

The missile strike option is unsettling for Russia, which

will have to stop using Crimea as a safe base for its ships and planes

.

Yesterday some sources already claimed that Russia was moving part of its Black Sea fleet from Sevastopol to the port of Novorossiysk, much further away and, this one, beyond the reach of these weapons.

This same Wednesday,

another column of smoke rose on the Chongar bridge

, one of the three footbridges that connect Crimea with the rest of Ukraine.

Again, it looks like an unconfirmed missile strike.

According to CNN, the number of planes destroyed on Tuesday has made this Tuesday one of the most destructive days for Russian Air Force aircraft since

World War II

, including the Soviet era.

The few data available on military aircraft losses during the Soviet era and the era of modern

Russia

do not indicate such substantial losses in a single incident, on a single day.

You have to go back to Israel's surprising performance in the Six-Day War, where it destroyed Egyptian aircraft on the ground in a few hours, to remember such a lethal attack.

Image from August 9 before the explosions of the Saki.AP base

The image from August 10, after the explosion, shows the charred remains of at least nine planes, while the conditions of two other jets are unclear.

In the photo you can also see four craters probably caused by the explosions, as well as obvious signs of burned areas of the base.

Image from August 10 after the explosions at the Saki.AP base

The model of the attack on the Crimean base seems to be modeled on

the one carried out by the British SAS during the German offensives in North Africa

during World War II.

Infiltrated between the dunes, the members of this elite troop managed to destroy dozens of Luftwaffe planes on Libyan airfields.

Ukrainian Air Force spokesman Yuri Ignat told

Ukraine

's "United News" television program that an ammunition depot at the base was damaged in what appeared to be a "major detonation," according to videos shown by the channel.

Ignat clarified that the base housed several

Su-30 SM, Su-24 and Il-76

aircraft , used for Black Sea patrols in the area between Crimea and Snake Island.

Four other bases in Crimea are used by Russia to patrol the area and attack targets in Ukraine.

The explosions at the

Saki

base mark the return of a warlike atmosphere to the peninsula for the first time since

Russia

annexed it more than eight years ago in the spring of 2014.

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