Ukraine celebrates Independence Day with first raid into Crimea

Ukrainian forces marked the country’s independence day with a naval raid into occupied Crimea, and President Volodymyr Zelenskiy praised Ukrainians for the defiance and courage that has won them global support in the fight with Russia.

The national holiday celebrates Ukraine’s independence from the former Soviet Union in 1991, but this year it also marks 18 months since Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion plunged the country into a war for survival.

Ukrainian troops landed on the western tip of Crimea, near the village of Olenivka, in the early hours of Thursday, defence intelligence said in a statement. They fought Russian troops and raised a Ukrainian flag, before all returned safely home.

It was the first time Ukrainian forces are known to have landed in Crimea since Putin ordered his forces over the border last year. They had to evade Russian defences on a long journey across the Black Sea, and then escape again after a skirmish.

A video mostly captured in blurry night vision showed Ukrainian fighters on boats, then attaching the country’s blue and yellow flag to a wooden building.

Kyiv says its path to victory must go through Crimea, illegally occupied by Russia in 2014, and has previously carried out a series of daring long-range and sabotage attacks on targets there. They have hit Russian warships and an airbase, and the Russian-built Kerch bridge, a prestige project linking Crimea to Russia.

With a counteroffensive against Russian troops occupying southern and eastern Ukraine only creeping forward, Kyiv appears to be looking for other ways to put pressure on Putin and his military.

This week drones destroyed a supersonic bomber jet at an airbase deep inside Russia and twice stopped flights in and out of Moscow, though Ukraine has not directly claimed responsibility for these operations. A Russian helicopter also recently landed in Ukraine, after the pilot was lured to defect.

Russian attacks continued across Ukraine, which was on high alert. At least 10 people were wounded in a missile strike on Dnipro, an important river port, with three hospitalised. Shelling in Kherson city injured a seven-year-old girl, officials said.

To mark Independence Day, Zelenskiy addressed a small audience in the square outside St Sophia’s cathedral. He also released a video filmed in front of a new mural of a captured soldier whose defiant death made him famous.

In an exchange caught on video and later released online, Oleksandr Matsievsky shouted “Glory to Ukraine” – a popular patriotic slogan – at the Russian soldiers holding him prisoner last year. They immediately gunned him down in response.

Zelenskiy described Ukraine’s resistance, and its successes against Russia as a collective effort to protect Ukrainian territory and its national identity.

“In a big war there are no small deeds, no unnecessary ones,” he said in a 12-minute video that thanked those who had died for Ukraine and their families, those injured in the line of duty, those taken prisoner and those still on the frontline.

He also paid tribute to everyone from farmers and medics to electrical engineers, musicians and sports stars. He included the millions of refugees who have fled the war, thanking refugee families still teaching their children Ukrainian and passing on their Ukrainian identity.

A clip of Matsievsky’s courageous last words ended Zelenskiy’s message: “We have all made it that when one person says ‘glory to Ukraine’, the whole world responds ‘glory to the heroes’.”