Attacks navy base

Ukraine naval base drew Putin’s wrath, then Russian fire

Early explosions hit a base Putin argued showed NATO’s incursion into his sphere of influence.

BY DAVID M. HERSZENHORN

Two explosions rocked the port of Ochakiv around 7 a.m. on Thursday, as Russian forces unleashed a fierce assault on a Ukrainian naval base President Vladimir Putin had personally griped about as a symbol of NATO’s encroachment into Moscow’s historic sphere of influence.

Within minutes, the waterfront area was blanketed in thick smoke and Base А2637, the naval installation and radar station, was engulfed in flames. At least four soldiers were seriously wounded in the blasts, the regional governor, Vitaliy Kim, said. He added that the number of casualties was certain to rise.

Ochakiv has been an important, strategic naval base for centuries —  known for being the site of a major battle of the Russo-Turkish war that began in May 1788. The city, then held by the Turks, was called Özi Kuşatması.

Russian forces led by Prince Grigory Potemkin and General Alexander Suvorov laid siege to the city. They ultimately conquered it with the help of the Scottish-American naval commander, John Paul Jones, who had accepted a commission as an admiral from Empress Catherine II.

On Monday, some 234 years later, in his rambling, paranoid and gripe-laden speech recognizing two breakaway regions of eastern Ukraine as independent, Putin claimed that Ochakiv was key to United States and NATO plans to turn Ukraine into a staging ground for attacks against Russia.

“The United States and NATO have begun the shameless development of the territory of Ukraine as a theater of potential military operations,” Putin said. “Regular joint exercises have a clear anti-Russian focus.”

“With the appearance of weapons of mass destruction in Ukraine, the situation in the world, in Europe, especially for us, for Russia, will change in the most radical way,” Putin added, though Ukraine surrendered its nuclear arsenal to Russia in 1994.

Later, he turned his attention to Ochakiv, a city of fewer than 14,000 about an hour’s drive from the regional capital of Mykolayiv, whose population has been declining for years.

“I will add that the Naval Operations Center in Ochakov, built by the Americans, makes it possible to ensure the actions of NATO ships, including the use of high-precision weapons by them against the Russian Black Sea Fleet and our infrastructure along the entire Black Sea coast,” Putin said, using the Russian name for the city. He also complained that the Ochakov base would be used to monitor Russian military forces stationed in Crimea, the annexed Ukrainian peninsula located fewer than 100 kilometers away.

But what Putin described as if it was a highly sophisticated naval complex, was in fact — like most Ukrainian military outposts following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 — badly depleted and dilapidated, according to the local commander. It had undergone only a modest upgrade with U.S. financial help, mainly to house five small Willard-model military speed boats and to accommodate NATO vessels participating in joint Black Sea exercises.

“It’s absolutely not a NATO base,” the commander, Captain Vitaliy Kharchenko, said in a brief interview outside his headquarters on Wednesday.

Kharchenko confirmed the widely available public information that “U.S. forces built several buildings here.” Among them are the so-called Maritime Operations Center, which he described as “a small building of 10 meters by 30 meters,” a boat maintenance facility and a building to store the five Willards, which Ukrainian media described as intended for use by special forces on stealthy missions.

Kharchenko noted that his base would be no match for Russia’s enormous military arsenal. On Thursday morning, the base felt the force of that arsenal, becoming one of the opening targets in the first wide-scale military invasion on the European Continent since World War II.

Other navy, army and air force bases were similarly attacked all across Ukraine, including in the Western part of the country, far from the eastern Donbass region where Ukrainian forces have spent years clashing with Russian-backed separatists.

Kharchenko, like many Ukrainians, said he believed that Putin was a madman.

“If someone is schizophrenic, he can even use nuclear weapons,” the captain said. “Nobody can stop him.”

Asked what the West might do to help, Kharchenko suggested supplying more weapons given Ukraine’s limited manufacturing capabilities. “We need more time to develop our own weapons,” he said.

On the day before the start of the war, life proceeded as normal in downtown Ochakiv.

Military personnel, who make up as much as one-third of the local population, could be seen throughout the city, strolling in uniform. The local market, redolent of smoked fish, was open for business, with stalls selling everything from vegetables to fishing gear as well as underwear and other apparel.

“Everybody of course is afraid of war,” said Nataliya Pishuk, the editor of Black Sea Star, which is now the only local newspaper left in Ochakiv. “We’re a military town.” Pishuk said residents were also concerned about the economic situation, which has deteriorated throughout the coronavirus pandemic.

Anna Belaya, the local librarian, said she took note of the Americans who arrived in town two summers ago to help work on the base. “There were 10 or 12, maybe 15 of them,” she said. “Builders, young guys. They were running every morning. Every day I saw them. They were physically fit.”

She said they did not appear to be military men, but construction workers. In addition to their work by the port, they had also helped renovate a children’s playground, a local school and a kindergarten.

“They didn’t have any conflicts,” Belaya said. “They had good contacts with residents of the city.”

Belaya dismissed the allegations that they had constructed a NATO base, and said it had been years since she had seen any Americans in town. “It’s nonsense,” she said. “If there would be a base, we will see the military.”

Nonsense or not, Russia has been complaining about NATO’s increased activity in and around Ochakiv for at least five years, as the U.S. Naval Institute, a think tank noted in a 2019 blog post. In 2017, for example, the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies published an article about Ukraine’s military aspirations titled: “Ukraine’s ‘Funny Fleet’ Goes to NATO Standards.”

Putin, his military advisers and his close associates weren’t laughing, however.

“We’ll drown you there, in the Black Sea, and we will destroy the Kiev government; this is Russian land — Ochakiv,” Vladimir Zhirinovsky, an ultra-right-wing politician said in an August 2017 speech to the State Duma, Russia’s lower house of Parliament.

“Your Americans will die, we will destroy them all, shoot them and hang you all. You vile creatures,” added Zhirinovsky, who has run for president several times as part of Russia’s “loyal opposition.” In December, Zhirinovsky predicted the invasion of Ukraine, practically to the hour, saying that the world would change on February 22 at 4 a.m. In fact, it turned out to be February 24, shortly after 4 a.m. Moscow time.

Putin, in his speech on Monday, reached all the way back to the Siege of Ochakov in 1788 to lay claim to the city. He said the U.S. had wanted to establish a similar naval center in Crimea but that this was blocked by Russia’s invasion and annexation of the peninsula in 2014

“The Crimeans and Sevastopol thwarted these plans; we will always remember this,” Putin said, while also insisting that the plans were recreated at the new center in Ochakiv.

“I repeat, today such a center has been deployed, it has already been deployed in Ochakov,” he said, before offering a history lesson. “Let me remind you that in the 18th century the soldiers of Alexander Suvorov fought for this city. Thanks to their courage, it became part of Russia.”

“Now,” he added, “they are trying to consign these milestones of history to oblivion, as well as the names of state military figures of the Russian Empire, without whose work modern Ukraine would not have many large cities and even the very exit to the Black Sea.”

Putin continued: “Recently, a monument to Alexander Suvorov was demolished in Poltava. What can you say? Renounce your own past? From the so-called colonial heritage of the Russian Empire?”

“Training missions of NATO countries are deployed in Ukraine,” Putin said. “These, in fact, are already foreign military bases.”

But it takes only a day-long visit to Ochakiv to find that Putin’s revanchist fantasies are not only dangerous but historically inaccurate. Although the residents are predominantly Russian-speaking, they self-identify as citizens of Ukraine, and ethnically the population is mixed. Asked if she considered herself Ukrainian or Russian, a woman working at the local history museum laughed. “I’m Moldovan,” said.

Andrei Kurkov, an acclaimed Ukrainian novelist who writes in Russian and whose books include “The Gardener from Ochakov,” said that the city had enjoyed a rich, colorful backstory, as well as shared in the suffering common throughout the former Soviet Union.

“In fact, if you are trying to tune to radio, even FM, first of all, you will listen to Romanian and Moldovan music and radio stations,” Kurkov said in a telephone interview from Kyiv, where he lives. “They reach very easily the Ochakov peninsula.”

“On the coastline and in the south, it’s a mixture of ethnic groups and nationalities,” he said.

Ochakiv’s fate, like that of all of Ukraine, is now uncertain. Residents on Thursday reported continued explosions. “We hear things falling,” said one resident, who was too frightened to give her name. Like every military town, the residents are terrified both for their homes and their loved ones in uniform.

Turkish, Russian or Ukrainian, it has been a military town for centuries.

“For me, it’s a magic town with lots of stories,” Kurkov said. “In Soviet times, it was a very happy place that nobody could enter without permission because it was a secret town with an army base and a navy base.”

Once the Soviet Union collapsed, he said: “The town immediately became very poor, shabby and forgotten, with lots of people with strong nostalgia for the Soviet past.”

“It’s still a shabby state,” he added. “They were dreaming of reviving the resort and making it popular again, but they didn’t have enough money to turn the Soviet rest houses into something more modern.”

“I think,” the Ukraine author who writes in Russian said in English: “The nostalgia is gone for many years.”