“To Be Continued”: Ukraine Burns Third Russian FSB Patrol Boat This Year

Ukraine's Defense Forces struck a Russian FSB  border guard patrol ship in the temporarily occupied Crimean port of Kerch overnight on July 17, the General Staff of Ukraine's Armed Forces reported.

The General Staff identified the vessel as a Project 10410 Svetlyak-class ship. Rather than a Russian Navy warship, it serves the FSB Border Guard Service, one of the security arms Moscow leans on to hold the occupied peninsula.

The General Staff framed the strike as part of a broader effort to reduce "the military-economic potential of the Russian aggressor."

The same overnight package hit two tankers, one of them a gas carrier, and a tug across the Black and Azov Seas. An oil terminal and a fuel depot in temporarily occupied Kerch also appeared on the target list, along with a refinery deep inside Russia and two logistics bridges.

The statement closed with a pointed sign-off promising more to come: "To be continued."

According to the General Staff, Project 10410 Svetlyak-class ships patrol the sea area, escort ships and vessels, and can support the operations of Russia's navy and other security structures.

Designed in the 1980s for the Soviet and later Russian border service, the class works as a coastal patrol platform, guarding the maritime frontier and shielding shipping from air and underwater attack.

The report noted that each ship carries a crew of 28, can remain at sea for up to 10 days, and makes more than 30 knots. That combination gives the border service a fast, persistent presence along contested coastlines.

NASA's FIRMS satellite system recorded a fire on the water off the eastern edge of Kerch beginning around 2 a.m. local time. That location, the report indicated, did not match other Russian vessels struck in the area that day, pointing to a separate hit.

The strike was the latest in a run of Ukrainian hits on Russia's border guard fleet. In May, Ukrainian drone operators reached a Project 10410 Svetlyak in the Caspian Sea near Kaspiysk, striking it while underway with an online-controlled drone from the manufacturer Fire Point.

Weeks later, on June 4, another Svetlyak of the same class was hit near Yurkine in temporarily occupied Crimea. On July 14, satellite imagery confirmed the destruction of the FSB patrol ship Izumrud near Novorossiysk, a vessel that had taken part in Russia's 2018 seizure of Ukrainian navy boats in the Kerch Strait.

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