Yes, clickbait headline, sorry. The city of Moscow has not been attacked. However, the missile cruiser "Moskva", or "MOCKBA" in Cyrillic, named after the Russian capital as it is actually called in Russian, has been sunk. "Moskva" was the capital ship of the Russian navy in the Black Sea region, and its loss is a major setback for Russia. This is also a major symbolic achievement for Ukraine in their retaliations against Russia's unprovoked attack and invasion that started on February 24.
The official Russian propaganda machine is not denying that "Moskva" has sunk, but they are hilariously not admitting that the cause is a missile attack. Instead, they are claiming a "fire that caused an ammunition explosion" and that "the cause of the fire is being investigated". Well, duh. A good lead for those investigations would be to consider the Ukrainian naval target missile of the Neptune type that struck the ship right as the fire started.
The lies from the Russian propaganda machine are not even making them look good. If a capital ship was sunk by a fire that broke out by accident and caused a major detonation in ammunition storage, it would be a sign of gross incompetence from Russia. They were clearly scrambling for an approach that would avoid admitting success for an attack by Ukraine, and in that process they decided to figuratively admit to shooting themselves in the foot.
The "Moskva" was a Soviet era vessel, but it had been recently modernised and returned to active service only last year. It served as the command center for Russia's Black Sea navy, and its anti-aircraft and anti-missile weaponry was providing air defense for the rest of their naval forces. The fact that it failed to defend itself against a small scale air attack from a few missiles is remarkable, not to say astounding, and paints a clear picture of Russia continuing to underestimate the capabilites and the resolve to fight of the Ukrainian army, be it out of arrogance, ineptitude or bad management, and take a bad beating for it.
The war in Ukraine is horrible, and the aggressor is very far from defeated, but I can't help but smile right now.
