On the night of May 19, the port of Izmail in Odessa Region came under a heavy strike. According to military Telegram channels, two powerful explosions hit the strategic site about 20 minutes apart.

Retired Colonel Anatoly Matviychuk, a military expert, told aif.ru that Izmail remains an important target for the Russian Armed Forces because of its role as a major logistics hub and NATO transshipment base. Through the port, he said, Ukraine can receive weapons and military equipment.

Matviychuk pointed out that Izmail sits at the intersection of maritime routes. River vessels can also reach the port via the Danube, unload cargo into warehouses, and from there send it on to supply the Ukrainian Armed Forces. He did not rule out that Western shipments may be moving under the cover of civilian transport, including dry cargo ships and grain carriers.

The expert said the overnight strike may have targeted not only port infrastructure and so-called ghost vessels moored at the berths, but also warehouses that could have held British-supplied unmanned boats. The Ukrainian Armed Forces use these naval drones for operations in the Black Sea, and destroying them would make it significantly harder to prepare similar attacks.

At the same time, Matviychuk acknowledged that a single strike cannot completely shut down such logistics routes. He said the opposing side adapts quickly: once some berths are destroyed, temporary unloading points appear away from the damaged facilities.

According to the expert, this makes the fight against such infrastructure an ongoing process. He said that after one unloading site is destroyed, another temporary berth can emerge hundreds of meters away, or even about a kilometer from the original location.