What are sunbathing tourists doing in a war zone?

This week, a Ukrainian long-range missile strike hit a beach in Sevastopol on Crimea. The beach was full of sunbathing tourists, and the attack was conducted with an ATACMS missile with a cluster munition warhead. Footage shows how most of the bomblets land in the water, but some also hit the beach where four people died and about 150 were wounded.

At first, the Russian Ministry of Defense announced that they had shut down an ATACMS missile, which then landed on the beach instead of hitting the intended target. They later changed that explanation to saying that the Ukrainians deliberately had targeted civilians. They also claim that the United States carries a big responsibility for the incident and the deaths of civilians because the Americans provide both the missiles and targeting data for the attack.

What happened?

Footage of the incident has become available from the beach, and it has sparked quite a debate about what really happened. It does indeed look like cluster munitions, but it also appears that the missile was damaged before it hit the beach. When a missile with cluster munitions works as intended, there will be a detonation that spreads the bomblets in a small area around the target. What we see on the images is that the bomblets are spread over a large area along the trajectory of the missile.

This indicates that the ATACMS missile was indeed intercepted by Russian air defenses. That also explains the somewhat strange direction that the missile was traveling in while spreading the bomblets, which doesn’t really correspond to a flightpath coming from Ukraine. If the missile was intercepted in air, it could have changed the direction of the warhead to what we see on the footage.

In the same attack, the Ukrainians apparently managed to destroy some installations belonging to the Russian Black Sea fleet, several sophisticated air defense systems of the S-300 and S-400 types, and a valuable ground station for satellite communications. These are all valid military targets for an ATACMS strike, and one would be justified in asking what all the sunbathing tourists were doing there in the first place. Why are people taking a vacation in a war zone? Wouldn’t it be prudent to have some security measures and at least a safety zone around the most obvious military targets?

But the Russians haven’t done that, and instead they have continued promoting Crimea as a good vacation destination. This desire to uphold an image of normality amid intensifying Ukrainian airstrikes on the peninsula shows us something interesting about how the Russian authorities would like to portray the “special military operation” – and the types of dilemmas they will face if the security situation continues to deteriorate.

Crimea under attack

Since Ukraine got access to ATACMS missiles a couple of month ago, they have been waging an intensive campaign against Russian assets in Crimea. ATACMS is a ballistic missile, which gives it the advantage of speed over the British/French Storm Shadow missiles. This means that ATACMS is useful for hitting air defense systems because they are difficult to intercept. 

Russia has therefore lost a very high number of S-300 and S-400 air defense systems in Crimea over the last couple of months. Crimea is so important for Russia that it is not an option to leave it without any air defense, but at the same time the ATACMS missiles seem to be destroying the Russian systems almost as fast as the Russians can move them into Crimea.

Potentially this ranged battle can get strategic significance because it stretches the Russian resources and forces the Russians to make tough decisions about where to allocate their air defenses. This will be particularly important when Ukraine gets F-16, because the less air defense the Russians have, the more freedom the Ukrainians will have to use F-16 for whatever they want.

So, the ATACMS missiles are giving the Russians some serious headaches in Crimea, and obviously they would be happy if the Ukrainians would stop using them. The incident on the beach in Sevastopol gives the Russians an opportunity to make the argument that it is immoral and dangerous for the Americans to be providing ATACMS missiles to Ukraine. However, the military advantages of the missiles are obvious.

Upholding the illusion of normalcy

While the Russians are extremely tired of the ATACMS missiles, they also want to maintain the illusion for the Russian people that things are under control and there is a little to worry about. Crimea plays a particularly symbolic role. It is important for the Russian government to show that they can guarantee the security in Crimea, and that’s why we see the sunbathing tourists in Sevastopol.

It is not a secret in the Russian media that Crimea is sometimes under attack, but generally the message is that the Russian military is extremely capable at shooting down the Ukrainian missiles and drones. You won’t read stories in the Russian media about how a Ukrainian ATACMS missile has destroyed another Russian air defense system.

Most likely if the attack in Sevastopol had been successful and just destroyed the intended military target, the Russian authorities would have downplayed the incident. They would have pretended that nothing happened, or that they shot down all the incoming missiles.

The only reason why this story has become a public event is that the missile fell down on a beach with thousands of civilians as witnesses and the large number of smartphones recording the event. This has created the somewhat ironic situation that because the Russian air defense actually did work this time, and they managed to shoot down an ATACMS missile, they have ended up with a pretty bad media story. It has shaken the picture that Sevastopol is a safe holiday destination, and that the mighty Russian military has everything under control.

In the long run it will probably be impossible for the Russian authorities to keep pretending that the Ukrainian airstrikes on Crimea are no big problem, and that civilian life can continue as before. But for the time being they seem determined to try. This is an indication that despite the ongoing war, the tough rhetoric, and the regular nuclear threats, the Russian government is still not at a place where they feel comfortable about how their own population will react to the realities of war. They still serve a fairytale about how the war is going to their own population, and some of the unpleasant realities are only recognized when they are impossible to hide.