OSINT analyst MT_Anderson released a satellite image of the waters of temporarily occupied Sevastopol on the morning of May 31, 2024, revealing two interesting details simultaneously.
The first is that russian military conducted a mysterious rescue operation for at least a week at the site of the probable sinking of the Black Sea Fleet's missile Tsiklon corvette of project 22800 (which was hit on the night of May 19, 2024).
Read more: The UK Defense Intelligence Analyzes the Destruction of russian Tsiklon Corvette
The second is that at that time, the occupiers had possibly the smallest number of ships in the waters of temporarily occupied Sevastopol since February 2022.
As directly shown in the above image, a russian hydrographic boat of project 23370 with special equipment for deploying divers is constantly operating at the site of the suspected sinking of the Tsiklon corvette. But the nuance is that taking a certain number of divers on board is the maximum that the size of this hydrographic boat allows.
Here, the question immediately arises as to what exactly the russian divers might be doing there – simply assessing the nature of the damage to the Tsiklon at the bottom of the temporarily occupied Sevastopol waters, searching for objects or weapon elements that need to be salvaged from the ship, or even evaluating the Tsiklon itself for its salvageability.
Interestingly, near the site of the search and rescue operations at the location of the Tsiklon sinking, there is also the russian Navy's Epron rescue ship, launched in 1959 and intended for rescuing crews of sunken submarines or for retrieving particularly vital weapon samples or other important items from the seabed.
Quite tellingly, in these images, we don't see the Kommuna search and rescue ship, which was hit in April 2024.
And also noteworthy is that in the "initial" satellite image provided by MT_Anderson in this publication, only three large surface ships from the russian Black Sea Fleet are visible: the Pylkiy patrol ship of the Soviet project 1135, along with the Yamal and Nikolai Filchenkov large landing ships.
Read more: Destruction of russia's Latest Tsiklon Corvette Officially Confirmed
