Ukrainian chronicle: Vengeance – Russian massive ‘retaliation strike’

Russian Armed Forces have delivered a massive missile strike on Ukraine’s military infrastructure as retaliation for Kiev's terrorist attack on the Bryansk border region on March 2, 2023, the Ministry of Defense said on March 9. In its statement the ministry said that the attack involved “high-precision long-range air, sea, and land-based weapons, including the Kinzhal hypersonic missile system.” The latter has a range of more than 2,000 km.

The massive retaliation strike” hit key elements of Ukraine's military infrastructure, defense industry complexes as well as energy facilities that contribute to their operations.

The barrage destroyed attack drone bases and disrupted the transportation of reserves and foreign weapons. The attack also disabled facilities used for repairing military equipment and ammunition production, the MoD claimed. “The mission has been accomplished. All assigned targets have been hit," the statement announced.

No Kinzhal-type missiles have been intercepted. Ukraine simply does not have specific interceptors that can hit such missiles.

It is important to note that transportation of reserves and foreign weapons have been obliterated. It means that new deliveries of attack weapons arranged by the West will be also destroyed.

The strike came after a Ukrainian raid into Bryansk region on the Russian-Ukrainian border on March 2 left two local residents dead and injured a ten-year-old boy. Russian President Vladimir Putin condemned the incident, calling it a “terrorist attack” and labeling the saboteurs “neo-Nazis.”

Russian mass media labelled new strikes as ‘vendetta’.

- Kiev had nothing to do with the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines, the Ukrainian defense minister has said in response to Western media reports blaming last September’s explosions of the gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea on an unidentified “pro-Ukraine” group. “For me, it’s a little bit strange story,” Aleksey Reznikov after his arrival at an informal meeting of EU defense ministers in Stockholm.

The claims of Ukrainian involvement in the sabotage are “like a complement for our special forces, but this is not our activity,” the minister added.

On March 7, the New York Times reported, citing US officials and unspecified new intelligence, that a “pro-Ukrainian group” may have been behind the September attack that disabled the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines, which were built to deliver Russian gas to Europe via Germany. A few hours later, several German outlets claimed the country’s investigators looking into the Nord Stream blasts had found that a yacht reportedly used in the attack belonged to a Polish-based firm, owned by two Ukrainians.

Kremlin press-secretary Dmitry Peskov described the reports in the US and German media as “a coordinated media hoax campaign,” aimed at diverting attention from the actual “masterminds” of the sabotage.

If NATO is so sure that a ‘pro-Ukraine group’ has no direct links with the USA and Ukraine it means that Washington and Kiev knew about the existence of such a group, and they used it as a cover up for the subversive state-arranged operation against the Nord Stream pipelines.

Dmitry Medvedev, the Deputy chair of the Russian Security Council, commented: “Six hardened saboteurs, with a lady among them, a femme fatale (how can there be a movie without one?) went out on a yacht into the stormy Baltic Sea. They took half a ton of explosives on board and performed a beautiful dive. And then they blew up two huge pipes at the bottom, before disappearing into the sunset. Unspotted by anybody. In the sea, full of NATO ships and international surveillance systems. They also returned the yacht to the owner, being brutal, but also law-abiding.”

“The goal of this cheap flick was to bamboozle the Europeans,” who are already getting tired of having to pay for the EU’s support to Ukraine amid the conflict with Russia, Medvedev said.

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