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After a year building up defenses in Crimea, Russia saw many of them swept away in a massive storm this weekend.
Much like they’ve done along the entire front line in Zaporizhzhya, in the approaches to Tokmak, Melitipol, and Mariupol, Russia built an extensive network of coastal defenses across all of western Crimea, attempting to protect against any Ukrainian amphibious assault.
This 100-year storm absolutely pummeled both Crimea and Ukraine’s port city of Odesa. The videos of the storm, with its 6-meter (20-foot) waves, are dramatic:
Those coastal defenses are all gone.
Now, the odds of Ukraine staging an amphibious assault on Crimea’s western coast are just about zero. Ukraine lacks the amphibious ships to transport equipment, the navy to protect them, the air power to cover their approach, and the sustainment capabilities to supply that force after landing. There is nothing more difficult in warfare than an amphibious assault, and Ukraine lacks pretty much everything it would need for one.
On the other hand, the elimination of these defenses, however temporary, will make it easier for Ukrainian raiding parties to infiltrate the coastline , like the way they did earlier this summer to reportedly destroy Russian radar arrays—sabotage that opened up Sevastopol to Ukrainian long-range missile attacks.
The storm may also affect Russia’s critically important railway logistics. This is in mainland Russia, near Putin’s palace in Sochi:
But the storm’s real value may not be those on-shore defenses and infrastructure, but the off-shore ones.
Russia has placed a network of barges and booms with netting all around its sensitive port facilities, both in Crimea and in Russia’s mainland. That includes all of its naval bases and the Crimean Kerch Bridge. The purpose is to block the ability of Ukrainian naval drones from hitting those targets, and by all indications, they are pretty effective at it.
The chances that any of those ocean defenses survived this massive storm are just about nil, giving Ukraine an opportunity to launch a new wave of naval drones against these targets. Heck, the Kerch Bridge is the juiciest and most strategically important target of all. Let’s hope Ukraine has the means to capitalize on this opportunity.
Furthermore, there will be a lot of unmoored mines floating around Russian harbors. If Ukraine is lucky, a few of them smashed up against Russian warships.
Another storm video:
Any rotary-wing aircraft Russia failed to evacuate is likely trashed. Hopefully, they were too incompetent to fly them out in time. There is also a great deal of hope that the storm might’ve sunk some Russian vessels. We’ll have more clarity in the coming 24 hours. Russians love to post videos of their broken stuff.
Wouldn’t it be great if streams of MAGA Americans fled to Russia? Problem is, if they only take the best and the brightest Americans to work on fixing toilets, that kind of excludes all of them.
Let’s hope they lower their standards.
