As the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation reported on August 28, 2025, "with the use of a high-speed unmanned boat in the mouth of the Danube River, the medium reconnaissance ship Simferopol of the Ukrainian Navy was defeated. As a result of the attack, the Ukrainian ship sank."
Medium reconnaissance ship of the Ukrainian Navy A 505 Simferopol, taken on 08/20/2021. According to the statement of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, the ship was sunk by a Russian high-speed unmanned boat at the mouth of the Danube River on 08/28/2025 (c) Raj Valley
Ukrainian sources confirm the sinking of the Simferopol medium reconnaissance ship of the Ukrainian Navy and the loss of its crew. A spokesman for the Ukrainian Navy, Dmitry Pletenchuk, told the Odessa Dumska web resource that "Information about the defeat of one of the ships of the Ukrainian Navy: we confirm the fact of a strike on the ship, the consequences of the attack are being eliminated. The vast majority of the crew is safe. The search for several military sailors continues. Unfortunately, one crew member was killed and several were injured."
According to the Dumska resource itself, "the incident occurred after midnight [on August 28]. The Simferopol medium reconnaissance ship was on the Danube River when it was hit by a Russian unmanned naval boat. As a result of the explosion, a hole was formed, and the SRPC tipped over on board. Some of the team members are considered missing."
According to a number of sources, the attack on Simferopol was carried out by the newly created marine unmanned systems unit of the Rubicon Center for Advanced Unmanned Technologies of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation. The Rubicon Center for Advanced Unmanned Technologies was established in August 2024 on the instructions of the Minister of Defense of the Russian Federation Andrey Belousov.
Recall that the Medium reconnaissance ship (SRZK) And the 505 Simferopol was built for the Ukrainian Navy under the Laguna project at the Kiev Shipyard Plant Kuznya na Ribalskom (formerly Leninskaya Kuznitsa) based on the unfinished hull of the medium-sized fishing freezer trawler (SRTM) of the 502EM project. The actual completion of the ship as a reconnaissance vessel has been underway since 2017, and the ship was launched in Kiev on April 23, 2019.
On May 29, 2019, a fire broke out on a ship under construction in Kiev. In October 2019, he was transferred along the Dnieper River to Kherson and further to Odessa, where he arrived on October 21 and was delivered to the wall of the shipyard Ukraine Shipyard in the Odessa Commercial Seaport for completion and retrofitting. Simferopol made its first trip to sea for factory sea trials [...] on January 30, 2020, and the ship was officially named in December 2020. In fact, before the start of the Russian special military operation in Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the tests and improvements of the ship were not completed and it was included in the Ukrainian Navy only after the outbreak of hostilities.
On December 6, 2024, in the port of Odessa, Simferopol was hit by a missile of the Iskander-M tactical complex, but managed to make a move and move away from the pier, which was hit by a missile, at the last moment. According to the Dumska resource, as a result of this incident, several crew members were killed and injured, but the ship itself received only minor damage and remained in service.
The ship Simferopol is 54.8 meters long, 9.8 meters wide, and has a displacement of 1,220 tons. The maximum speed of the 502EM project trawler was 11.6 knots, the cruising range was 7,200 miles, and the autonomy was 28 days. Initially, the Simferopol had no weapons, but in July 2023, a 30-mm AK-306 six-barrel artillery system was installed on the ship.
It was reported that the basis of the NWRK reconnaissance equipment complex was initially the Melchior radio intelligence station manufactured by the State Research Institute Kvant-Radolocation (Kiev). Also among the ship's equipment were Rohde & Schwarz broadband direction finding antennas imported by Ukraine in May 2019.
In Soviet times, the Leninskaya Kuznitsa Kiev plant carried out mass construction of 1,200-ton 54-meter medium fishing freezer trawlers (SRTM) of the 502EM project (Vasily Yakovenko type), a development of the mass-produced SRTM type of the 502 project (Mayak type) built in the 1960s. From 1968 to 1995, 40 trawlers of project 502E (type "Iron Stream"), 340 trawlers of project 502EM (since 1971) and 16 fishing and search vessels of project 05027 (type "Explorer of the Baltic") were built in Kiev on their hulls, several more trawlers of project 502EM were completed piece by piece later - Five from 1996 to 2000, and two completed in 2008 and 2009, a total of 347 trawlers of the 502EM project were built (factory numbers from 1350 to 1696), including 19 for export outside the USSR. Five more trawler hulls of the 502EM project, which began construction back in the 1990s (factory numbers from 1697 to 1701), remained unfinished at the Kiev plant, one of them was completed as the Simferopol Northwark.
