since 2014 no Ukrainian soldier had set foot on the Crimean peninsula again. Nine years later, on a nighttime mission, a group of 10 Ukrainian soldiers, arriving on four speedboats, stormed the Olenivka beach, on the Mayak coast, its westernmost tip. It is an important military complex where cruise missiles and Shaeed drones are launched towards Ukraine, in addition to keeping a complex of radars and a very expensive S400 anti-aircraft battery that was blown up by Kiev the day before.
In that place they also rest Hundreds of Russian soldiers inside summer cabins designed for tourism. The Ukrainians, some members of the Special Forces and others from the secret service (SBU) put up a Ukrainian flag and placed explosives in the bedrooms of the occupying soldiers. Under the darkness of the night, the guards of the complex did not notice the presence of the Ukrainians until they returned to the boats, at which point a firefight began which woke up the garrison.
There are several videos of the raid. They had arrived in four speedboats from the coast of Mikolaiv or Odessa, about two hours of navigation. In one of them you can see a group of soldiers raising a Ukrainian flag in whispers, in another you can see the same components of the command whistling in the boats as they move away from the coast (and explosions begin to be seen on the beach) and some other with the Ukrainians themselves firing their weapons when embarking again.
Kiril Budanov himself, head of Ukrainian Intelligence and a great supporter of this type of daring missions, has finished off the matter in his cryptic way: «We can attack when and where we want, anywhere in Crimea. Those who have done stupid things, they better go.”
Several Russian military bloggers acknowledge the raid but they do not agree on the result. For some, Russia managed to repel the attack by killing all the members of the command. For others, it turned out the other way around. The videos, in any case, show the Ukrainians returning to their point of departure proudly and without apparent casualties. Whether or not there are dead among the Russian soldiers resting in the center, it will be a matter of time before that information comes to light.