HELSINKI (The Thursday Times) — Finland’s military said on Thursday it had detected “a strike on a Russian warship in the Gulf of Finland area”, after Ukraine’s security service said its drones had hit a Russian missile ship in what is thought to be Kyiv’s first attack on a Russian vessel in the open Baltic Sea.
The Finnish Defence Forces said they had “monitored the development of the situation” and that Finland faced no immediate military threat. They did not say where or when the strike happened, or how it was detected. Foreign Minister Elina Valtonen said the situation in the Baltic Sea remained stable and safe, and that there was no threat to shipping.
Ukraine’s SBU security service said it had struck the Naro-Fominsk, a Buyan-M class small missile ship launched in 2022 that can fire Kalibr and Oniks cruise missiles, during an overnight drone raid on the Baltic oil port of Ust-Luga on Wednesday. It said it was checking reports that Russian combat helicopters had also been destroyed. Neither claim has been independently confirmed, and Russia has not commented on the ship.
Estonia’s defence minister, Martin Herem, said the ship was hit at about 05:30 local time on Wednesday. “We know that smoke came from the ship afterwards. The ship itself went back towards St Petersburg,” he said. The extent of any damage or casualties is not known.
Fires at Ust-Luga
Ukraine’s General Staff said the drones damaged five petroleum product tanks at Ust-Luga with a combined capacity of 150,000 cubic metres, set a hydrocracking unit on fire, and hit a pumping station and a pier used to load tankers. It called Ust-Luga “one of Russia’s key ports on the Baltic Sea”. Fires at the port could be seen across the border in Estonia.
The SBU said the raid was part of its effort to “systematically disable Russia’s oil infrastructure, reducing revenue to the Kremlin’s budget”. A regional governor said earlier this week that drones had started a fire at the same port, injuring three workers (read more).
Drones on NATO’s border
Herem said Ukrainian drones flew at the Ust-Luga area from midnight until about 06:00, mostly close to the Estonian border but inside Russian airspace. One briefly crossed into Estonian airspace from Latvia before heading towards Russia, he said. NATO aircraft based in the Baltic states were in the air, but it was not considered safe to shoot the drones down.
On Wednesday, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania told people to take shelter because of drones in their airspace. Ukraine’s foreign ministry spokesman, Heorhiy Tykhyy, called Moscow’s claims that Kyiv had used Baltic airspace to attack Russia “baseless”, but said “incidents might occur when Russia diverts drones from its airspace using electronic warfare”.
The Gulf of Finland is a narrow arm of the Baltic Sea between Finland and Estonia that runs east to St Petersburg. It carries oil tankers and civilian ships, and subsea data cables run across it. Britain said this week that Russian naval activity near its waters had risen sharply (read more).
Emil Kastehelmi, a military analyst and co-founder of the Black Bird Group monitoring group, said Russia’s Baltic fleet “has been untouched up to this point but there seemingly was a window of opportunity for Ukraine”. He said he did not see the strike as a serious escalation.
The attack came as US envoys headed to meet Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, after their talks with Vladimir Putin in Moscow (read more).
