Ukraine destroyed a state-of-the-art Russian air defence system in an overnight drone and missile attack in annexed Crimea, Kyiv has claimed.

Kyiv‘s security service (SBU) managed to blind the S-400 ‘Triumf’ system by firing a series of drones at its radar and antenna before the Navy fired two its newly-developed Neptune cruise missiles at the system’s launch complexes, a Ukrainian intelligence source said.

Video footage showed powerful explosions and a plume of smoke rising in the night sky near the western town of Yevatoriya, which is where the Russian facility is located.

The strikes on the S-400 is significant since the state-of-the-art air defence system and associated radar should detect and nullify drones and missiles over some 200 miles.

And it illustrates yet again the success of Ukraine’s Neptune anti-ship missile, which has been modified to attack ground targets, military analysts say. 

Last month, Ukraine detonated a modified subsonic Neptune missile in Crimea, destroying another of Russia‘s S-400 Triumf air defence systems in a spectacular explosion that also took out Russian troops.

Initial speculation was that Kyiv had used a British or French supplied Storm Shadow missile with pinpoint accuracy in last month’s deadly strike on Olenivka at Cape Tarkhankut in northwest Crimea. 

But a Ukrainian official confirmed that the attack was ‘100 per cent carried out by a modified Neptune’. 

Russia has yet to comment on the latest attack on the S-400 Triumf system. Instead, Moscow said its air defences shot down 11 attack drones overnight over Crimea, which Russia seized and annexed from Ukraine in 2014. 

Debris from the Ukrainian drones was found in Yevpatoriya, said Russian reports, while locals reported hearing 15 explosions that caused buildings to shake.

The S-400 ‘Triumf’ system is designed to destroy aircraft, cruise and ballistic missiles, including medium-range missiles. It can also be used on ground targets. 

Separately in the Russian region of Saratov, near the village of Krasny Oktyabr, a huge explosion on a major gas pipeline sent flames shooting into the sky today. 

The cause of this giant blast was not immediately clear and an investigation is underway, but Russia is facing a rising tide of sabotage attacks. 

In the Black Sea, Russia’s defence ministry claimed its forces had repelled a concerted attack by five kamikaze marine drones on patrol ship Sergei Kotov.

The ship had used its weapons to destroy the sea drones, according to Russian sources.

Meanwhile, three aircraft-type aerial drones were downed in the Bryanak region close to the Ukrainian border, say the Moscow authorities.

Ukraine has stepped up its attacks on Russia – and Putin-held territory – in recent weeks. 

On Wednesday, Ukraine launched missiles at the Crimean port of Sevastopol, home to the Russian navy’s Black Sea Fleet, in an attack that signalled Ukraine’s growing missile capabilities.

The missile attack on the Sevastopol Shipyard caused heavy damage to a large Russian landing ship and submarine, commercial satellite imagery showed. 

Kyiv said on Wednesday the two vessels were likely beyond repair after the pre-dawn missile attack on the port city while Russia’s defence ministry confirmed the strike, but said the vessels would be fully repaired and return to service. 

Overhead images of the shipyard taken by the Black Sky company the day before and the day of the September 13 attack showed two vessels in dry dock were visibly damaged.

‘The Minsk Project 775 Ropucha-class landing ship and the Rostov-on-Don Kilo-class submarine vessels… sustained damage,’ the company wrote on the X social media platform late on Wednesday, publishing the images.

The strike was seen by military analysts as the biggest attack of the war on Sevastopol, which is home of the Russian navy’s Black Sea Fleet. 

Meanwhile, Ukraine has continued to use its newly-developed Neptune missiles in the war – as was the case in today’s overnight strike. 

The new missile is now designed to hit ground targets, with modifications including changes to its GPS system and a vastly extended range. 

One of the anti-ship missiles famously sank the Moskva flagship of Vladimir Putin’s Black Sea Fleet last year. 

Kyiv has had to turn to the development of its own long-range missiles after allied nations supplying munitions stipulated that they could not be used outside of Ukraine’s territory.

Danny Murphy leaps to the defence of Casemiro as he insists the Man United midfielder wouldn’t look ‘as isolated’ if he had a better defensive set-up around him

• Casemiro has come under criticism for his performances vs Spurs and Wolves
• But Danny Murphy says the Brazilian needs more defensive support in midfield 
• WATCH: ‘It’s All Kicking Off’ – Episode 2 – Mail Sport’s brand new football show 

By Abdi Rashid For Mailonline

Updated: 12:30 EDT, 23 August 2023

Jamie Carragher says Liverpool’s defence is a ‘big worry’ after Chelsea were the ‘better team’ in 1-1 draw at Stamford Bridge, as Anfield legend identifies two positions Reds need to strengthen

By Samuel Draper For Mailonline

Published: 14:16 EDT, 13 August 2023 | Updated: 14:44 EDT, 13 August 2023

Vladimir Putin has not openly criticised his long-suffering defence minister amid the war in Ukraine, but the Russian president appeared to make his feelings towards Sergei Shoigu very clear on a visit to a hospital for wounded soldiers.

Putin and Shoigu yesterday visited the Vishnevsky Central Military Clinical Hospital in Moscow to greet several servicemen who sustained all manner of gruesome injuries amid the Kremlin chief’s war in Ukraine. 

Upon their arrival at the medical facility, Putin quickly walked around the group, awkwardly shaking the hands – and in some cases bandaged stumps – of the medically discharged veterans, asking them how they were coping and thanking them for their service.

As is typical of such visits, most of the soldiers could not look their leader in the eye and instead stared straight ahead, their bodies rigid with anxiety. None smiled, or seemed particularly pleased to meet their president.

Having completed his round of pleasantries, Putin returned to stand shoulder to shoulder with Shoigu who waited mute at the hospital’s entrance. 

As the president approached, Shoigu leaned towards him and appeared to utter a few words, but was met with a wall of silence as Putin promptly made an about-face and stood with his back to the defence minister, ignoring his every word in a characteristically frosty manoeuvre. 

It comes as Russian troops continue to falter on the frontlines in Ukraine, with Kyiv’s forces having successfully recaptured ground in the Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia regions amid their long-awaited counteroffensive. 

Shoigu was appointed Russia’s defence minister in 2012 and has been one of Putin’s closest allies for the past decade.

The pair are known to have holidayed together regularly and are believed to have shared a close personal friendship outside of their respective roles.

But Shoigu has no military background, having trained as a civil engineer and held the position of emergency situations minister for years prior to his move to head up the Russian defence ministry. 

In addition, Shoigu was never a part of Russia’s state security apparatus – experience held by many of Moscow’s political elites – and thus his competence as defence minister was questioned by many analysts even before Russian tanks rolled across the Ukrainian border last February. 

Since then, Shoigu is one of the few top ranking defence and military leaders that has somehow retained his position. 

Putin has run through several army chiefs of staff, demoting or outright removing military chiefs he perceived as incompetent amid his troops startling losses and battlefield failures. 

Shoigu has also faced a torrent of angry criticism from Wagner chief Prigozhin, who has routinely hit out at the Russian army’s failure to support his mercenaries in the fight for Bakhmut and accused the Russian defence minister of withholding ammunition from his troops. 

Prigozhin’s Wagner group just last month managed to wrest Bakhmut out of Ukrainian hands after months of brutal fighting reminiscent of World War I trench warfare, with tens of thousands killed on both sides.

The mercenary figurehead just weeks ago released a video in which he scolded Shoigu and army chief Valery Gerasimov, taunting them and urging them to go to the frontlines and see the failures for themselves. 

‘Now part of the settlement of [Berkhivka] has already been lost, the troops are slowly falling back. What a disgrace! 

‘Shoigu, Gerasimov, I urge you to come to the front, raise your pistols at your men to make them go forward. Come on, you can! 

‘And if you can’t, then you will die as heroes.’ 

On Monday, Ukrainian deputy defence minister Hanna Mailar said the country’s troops had recaptured a total of seven villages spanning 90 square kilometres (35 square miles) of eastern Ukraine over the past week in the first days of their counteroffensive.

Russian officials didn’t confirm those Ukrainian gains, which were impossible to verify and could be reversed in the to-and-fro of war.

But the Institute for the Study of War, which analyses a variety of open source information to provide near-daily updates of frontline developments, confirmed Ukrainian troops had retaken some seven settlements in Zaporizhzhia and Donetsk and had continued to push back Russian troops around the embattled city of Bakhmut. 

Ukrainian Eastern Group of Forces spokesperson Colonel Serhiy Cherevaty stated that Ukrainian troops continued counterattacks on the flanks of Bakhmut and advanced 250 to 700 meters in unspecified areas on the outskirts of the city, and pro-Russian military bloggers noted that Ukrainian forces continued counterattacks on Russian positions southwest, north and northwest of Bakhmut.

The advances have amounted to only small bits of territory and underscore the difficulty of the battle ahead for Ukrainian forces, who will have to fight metre by metre to regain the roughly one-fifth of their country under Russian occupation.

But any counterattacking success enjoyed by Ukraine only serves to highlight the continued struggles of Putin’s forces whose progress in Donetsk and the capture of Bakhmut was largely down to the efforts of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner group of mercenary fighters, rather than Moscow’s own regular troops.  

The head of the Wagner mercenary group today declared a withdrawal from the embattled city of Bakhmut on May 10 and slammed the Russian defence minister as ‘scum’ over his failure to provide sufficient ammunition to frontline forces.

But senior Ukrainian officials cast doubt over Yevgeny Prigozhin’s announcement, alleging it is likely a ploy designed to distract Ukraine’s armed forces from another brutal Russian assault ahead Moscow’s Victory Day celebrations on May 9.

Ukraine’s Deputy Defence Minister Hanna Maliar said Wagner’s proposed retreat, which would come one day after the annual events commemorating the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany in World War Two, was a lie and claimed Kyiv’s troops were instead seeing an influx of more mercenary fighters to the front lines.

‘We are now seeing them pulling (fighters) from the entire offensive line where the Wagner fighters were, they are pulling (them) to the Bakhmut direction,’ Maliar said in televised comments.

‘The Russians are inclined towards symbolism and their key historic myth is May 9 and they really have set the objective of taking control of Bakhmut by this date,’ she said.

It comes after Prigozhin – nicknamed Putin‘s ‘chef’ for his close links to the dictator – raged against Sergei Shoigu and Russian army chief General Valery Gerasimov in a gruesome video posted on Telegram yesterday. 

The mercenary leader was filmed standing over the corpses of dozens of slain Wagner fighters – all of whom he claimed had been killed in bitter fighting earlier that day in fervent attempts to capture Bakhmut. 

In an emotional and foul-mouthed rant, he said: ‘These are the Wagner PMC [Private Military Company] fighters who died today – the blood is still fresh… Film them all!’

Addressing Putin-appointees Shoigu and Gerasimov, who are in charge of military operations, he said: ‘Now listen to me, you ******* *****. These are someone’s ******* fathers and someone’s sons.

‘And those scum who don’t give us ammunition will eat their guts in hell. Mother*******.’

Prigozhin then declared he will withdraw all his fighters from the front lines in Bakhmut by May 10 in the face of ‘senseless’ losses.

‘My men will not take unnecessary and unjustifiable losses in Bakhmut without ammunition,’ he said in a video addressed to Shoigu and Gerasimov.

‘Therefore, as of May 10, 2023, we are withdrawing from the settlement of Bakhmut.

‘If, because of your petty envy, you don’t want to give victory to Russians in Bakhmut, then that is your problem!’ 

Meanwhile, Moscow today ordered the evacuation of families with children and of the elderly from Russian-held frontline areas in southern Ukraine because of an increase in shelling from the Ukrainian side.

‘In the past few days, the enemy has stepped up shelling of settlements close to the front line,’ the Russian-installed head of the Zaporizhzhia region, Yevgeny Balitsky, wrote on social media.

‘I have therefore made a decision to evacuate first of all children and parents, elderly people, disabled people and hospital patients,’ he wrote.

Ukraine has been preparing an offensive against Russian forces for months and some analysts say sabotage attacks and long-distance strikes behind Russian lines in recent days show it is now imminent.

Last year, the mercenary group’s ranks swelled as they recruited thousands of criminals from prisons and were furnished with weapons, ammunition and equipment by Russia’s then-army chief General ‘Armageddon’ Sergei Surovikin – a close ally of Prigozhin.

But Surovikin was demoted in January in favour of Russia’s army chief Gerasimov, who with the long-suffering defence minister Shoigu is wary of Prigozhin and sees his group’s success as damaging to the Russian army’s ailing reputation. 

Wagner has since been banned from recruiting prisoners – and Prigozhin believes Gerasimov and Shoigu are responsible for stemming the flow of vital ammunition and equipment to Wagner’s front line forces.

‘We’re 70% short of ammunition,’ the Wagner chief declared in the grisly video.

‘Shoigu [and] Gerasimov: where the **** is the ammunition?

‘You’re sitting around, you scum, in expensive clubs. Your children are getting off on life, making videos on YouTube.

‘You think you’re the masters of this life and that you have the right to dispose of their lives. You think that if you’ve got warehouses full of shells, you’re entitled to them.’

Shoigu has insisted adequate ammunition supplies have been delivered to Wagner and other frontline troops. But Prigozhin’s outburst appears to confirm suspicions that the Russian defence ministry are seeking to undercut the mercenary group.

The Wagner boss told the defence minister: ‘It’s a basic calculation – if you give us the [correct] ammunition, five times fewer will die.

‘They came here as volunteers and are dying for you to live in your redwood offices. Keep that in mind.’

In theory both Prigozhin and Shoigu are on the same side amid the conflict in Ukraine, and are among autocrat Putin’s most loyal henchmen.

But Prigozhin has declared his own war on Shoigu and his right-hand man Gerasimov.

Putin meanwhile remains silent on the rift that threatens to tear apart his armed forces, and has appeared weak in his failure to address the issue. 

Prigozhin’s extreme rants against the army’s high commander, of which this is the strongest, should lead him to be arrested under Putin’s draconian laws preventing criticism of the army.

But Wagner has proven effective on the battlefield – more so than many regular Russian army units – and the mercenary leader seems to have been given carte blanche to operate freely without fear of reprimand.  

Wagner – composed of mercenaries, volunteers and convicts – has suffered tens of thousands of losses in the war so far. 

Prigozhin blames the scale of the deaths on the army’s refusal to release proper supplies of ammunition and weaponry – though many of his units are also poorly trained, owing to their recent recruitment from the Russian penal system.