Ukraine’s ‘largest’ naval ship sunk

Ukrainian Navy's reconnaissance ship Simferopol, which was reportedly the largest ship commissioned by the country in over a decade, has been hit and sunk in a naval drone strike, the Russian Defence Ministry announced on Thursday.

The Laguna-class, medium-sized ship, designed for radio, electronic, radar, and optical reconnaissance, was struck in the delta of the River Danube, part of which is located in Ukraine's Odessa Region, a Defence Ministry statement said.

This was the first successful use of a sea drone to take out a Ukrainian Navy vessel, as per a TASS report citing a UAV expert, the RT reported. Ukrainian authorities confirmed that the vessel has been hit.

Meanwhile, Russia said yesterday that Western proposals on security guarantees for Ukraine would increase the risk of conflict between Moscow and the West by turning Kyiv into a "strategic provocateur" on Russia's borders.

Ukraine's European allies are working to put together a set of guarantees for Ukraine that could be part of a potential peace settlement and would be designed to protect Kyiv from a possible future attack by Russia, reports Reuters.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Thursday he expected a framework of the security guarantees to be set out as soon as next week.

"Security guarantees must be based on reaching a common understanding that takes into account Russia's security interests," Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said yesterday.

She told a news briefing in Moscow that the current proposals were "one-sided and are clearly designed to contain Russia."

"This line (of proposals) violates the principle of indivisible security and assigns Kyiv the role of a strategic provocateur on Russia's borders, increasing the risk of the (Nato) alliance becoming involved in an armed conflict with our country."

Moscow has previously said it does not like the European proposals and will not accept any presence of Nato troops on Ukrainian territory.