Dmytro Pletenchuk, spokesman for the Naval Forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, denied information from The New York Times that the destruction of the cruiser Moskva was coordinated with the United States of America.
The Navy speaker is quoted by the channel TsAPLIENKO_UKRAINE FIGHTS.
Pletenchuk noted that Ukraine did not receive the coordinates of the warship from the United States.
"The operation to destroy the flagship of the Black Sea Fleet was planned and carried out exclusively by the Ukrainian Navy. We coordinated the strikes only with our top leadership - Ukrainian, of course. So talk about coordination with the Americans or their data about the ship's location is not true. As is the fact that it had to be coordinated with someone," he said.
As an illustration of Pletenchuk's words, the Telegram channel posted free images of the cruiser Moskva taken by the Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 satellites before the attack.
As a reminder, the New York Times investigation said that the strike on the Russian ship caused anger among American officials because the Ukrainians did not warn them about it, as well as surprise that Ukraine had missiles to destroy such a cruiser. In addition, it caused panic because the administration of former US President Joe Biden did not plan to authorize an attack of this magnitude.
The missile cruiser Moskva sank on April 14, 2022 as a result of a strike by two Neptune missiles from the RK-360МЦ Neptune coastal missile complex of the Ukrainian Navy, when the cruiser was in the area of Zmiiniy Island. The cruiser was the flagship and largest warship of the Russian Black Sea Fleet and was among the six largest ships of the Russian Navy. Moskva is the first lost flagship of the Russian fleet since the Russo-Japanese War.