Russian Maritime Drone Attacks Ukrainian Druzhba Training Sailing Ship

In the port of Odesa, a Russian maritime drone attacked the Ukrainian training sailing ship Druzhba.

Serhiy “Flash” Beskrestnov, an advisor to the Ukrainian Minister of Defense, reported this.

Druzhba is a training sailing ship. In 2021, repair work began on it to prepare it for transfer to the Naval Academy.

That is precisely why the choice of this target caused surprise and debate among military experts.

“I understand why Oreshnik hit the garages—it was, after all, a ‘decision-making center.’ But why did a Russian naval drone heroically attack the sailing ship yesterday? The entire strategic reserve of rum from there was taken away a long time ago,” Flash noted.

According to one theory, the operator of the Russian drone did not detect any more important targets in the port area. In that case, the strike could have been directed at the nearest vessel within the drone’s range.

The Druzhba training sailing ship was built at a Polish shipyard in Gdańsk in 1987, along with sister ships—the Chersones, Pallada, Mir, and Nadezhda—for the Soviet Union’s maritime educational institutions.