A few days after a missile struck a Turkish cargo ship stranded in Ukraine’s war-torn port of Kherson, a video has emerged on social media believed to show just such an attack.
According to the Turkish website Turk Deniz Medya, the footage is thought to have been taken by the Russian soldiers who carried it out.
Source: Turk Deniz Medya
In the video, a man wearing military fatigue stretches himself to the ground on a jetty on the bank of a river, takes aim at a group of commercial ships across the water and pulls the trigger of a self-propelled anti-tank guided missile.
Two missiles are fired and both can be seen hitting their target.
According to Turk Deniz Medya, the ship under attack may have been the 17,300-dwt Sea Lord (built 1986).
Vessel trackers show the Belize-flag ship as stuck in Kherson since 24 February 2022, the day Russia invaded Ukraine.
Officials at GMZ Shipmanagement, the Lebanon-based entity listed as its technical manager, were not immediately contactable.
It is unclear when the footage was taken.
Its publication, however, comes a week after the Turkish-owned 3,900-dwt Tuzla (built 1980) suffered a missile attack in Kherson that inflicted severe damage on the vessel without causing human loss.
Several vessels have been stuck in Ukraine since Russia invaded.
Kherson has been on the front line ever since. It fell quickly into Russian hands but Ukrainian forces took back control in November, following a successful counterattack.
The city, however, remains well within striking distance of Russian troops who have holed themselves up on the south bank of the Dnipro River.
On 30 January, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy reiterated calls for the safe corridor known as the Black Sea Grain Initiative to be extended to ports in the Mykolaiv region.
