Russian Air Force Hits Turkish-Operated Black Sea Grain Bulker With Anti-Ship Missile

A Russian anti-ship missile struck and damaged a civilian cargo ship carrying grain in the western reaches of the Black Sea, in a rare air attack on civilian shipping traffic in the region.

A Kh-22 missile dropped by a Russian Tu-22M3 (NATO reporting name “Backfire”) bomber slammed into the port side of the 27,300 deadweight ton bulk carrier MV Aya on Sept. 11 in a morning strike. Reportedly, the weapon was one of three launched by a trio of bombers flying over the Black Sea shortly after 11 a.m.

The Belize-owned, Turkey-operated Aya was carrying Ukrainian grain loaded in the port Chornomorsk and was en route to Egypt. At the time the Russian missile struck her, the Aya was in international waters some 15-20 nautical miles off shore. She had been travelling in convoy with other cargo vessels, news reports said.

The cranes and superstructure of the vessel were torn up by the massive Kh-22, a five-ton, Soviet-era supersonic missile designed to take out US supercarriers with a one-ton warhead.

Images showed wrecked decking and a five-meter wide hole punched in the roof of one of Aya’s grain bunkers. No casualties were reported. Per open source ship registry data the Aya carries 23 crew.

The Istanbul news platform TurkiyeToday on Friday reported Aya crewmembers had repaired some damage and managed to change course and sail to the Romanian port of Constanța.

According to the civilian ship tracking service vesselfinder.com the Aya on Friday morning was at sea some 25 nautical miles east of the Romanian port of Constanța. She had been stationary and apparently at anchor in international waters off the Romanian coast since Thursday.

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Kyiv officials, led by President Volodymyr Zelensky, accused the Kremlin of attacking civilian shipping with the goal of preventing Ukrainian grain from reaching world markets.

“Russia launched a strike on an ordinary civilian vessel in the Black Sea right after it left Ukrainian territorial waters,” Zelensky said in a statement.

“Ukraine is one of the key global food security guarantors,” he added. “Domestic stability and normal life in dozens of countries around the world are dependent on the normal and unhindered operation of our food expert corridor. Ukraine’s food deliveries to African and Middle Eastern countries are critical… Wheat and food security should never be targets for missiles.”

Various Ukrainian milbloggers suggested the Tu-22-launched missile strike against the Maya may have been an error. The two or three bomber strike package had flown a risky mission out over the Black Sea to launch missiles not to attack cargo ships, but Ukrainian shore radars and air-defense facilities on Zmiyny Island, a 1.5- square-kilometer rocky outcrop some 18 kilometers east of the Danube Delta, those unconfirmed reports said.

Two heavy missiles missed the island and fell into the sea, but one locked onto the Maya and struck her by accident, those reports claimed.

The military information outlet Navalnews.com in a Thursday report said the ship was probably hit intentionally, at a point in the sea 70 kilometers south of Zmiyny Island, outside a ship protection corridor declared by Ukraine but well within Romania’s maritime Economic Exclusion Zone. According to Navalnews the strike was intentional.

Prior to the strike, Ukrainian civilian air defense information networks warned of Tu-22 aircraft and, shortly after 11:00 a.m., missile launches, with air-raid warnings across southern Ukraine.

Since its full-scale invasion in February 2022, Russia has launched hundreds Kh-22 missiles (NATO reporting name: AS-4 ‘Kitchen’) at Ukrainian homes, businesses and infrastructure on land.

The attack against MV Aya marked the first time a Kremlin-launched missile has directly struck a civilian grain ship during the war, and directly violated international law including the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), TurkiyeToday reported.

The strike and damage to the 26-year-old Aya likely marked the first wartime use of the 60-year-old AS-4 Kitchen missile, Kyiv Post researchers found.

Russia in July 2023 announced it was quitting a multilateral agreement not to attack civilian traffic moving to or from Ukrainian ports, and declared shipping in the Black Sea subject to naval blockade and potential attack.

Ukraine retaliated in August by declaring a protected shipping corridor off its southwest coast patrolled and monitored by Ukrainian air and sea forces.

Since then sea cargo traffic between Ukraine and overseas ports has moved for the most part smoothly, because of strong Ukrainian air defenses in the region that prevent Russian strike aircraft from approaching the shipping lane.

Aside from rare sea mine attacks, Russia’s air and naval forces had not attempted to interfere with civilian ship traffic moving near the coasts of NATO members Romania, Bulgaria and Turkey.

The Russian Navy in October 2023 abandoned its main Black Sea Fleet base in Sevastopol, Crimea and transferred most fleet elements to a converted civilian port in Abkhazia, at the east end of the Black Sea.

Ukrainian missile strikes against the Sevastopol port and neighboring bases sank about one of three warships operated by the Black Sea Fleet at their moorings, before the Kremlin ordered surviving ships shifted out of range.

The worst Russian naval defeat of the war took place in April 2022, when the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, the cruiser Moskva, was sunk by a pair of Ukrainian anti-ship missiles.