The Russian invasion of Ukraine has become a testing ground for new weapons and tactics. In particular, the naval operations have attracted a lot of interest from the world’s militaries. It has turned into a lopsided contest in which Ukraine has already destroyed around one-third of the Russian Baltic Fleet—despite having no major combat ships of its own. This result may have serious implications for navies around the world.
"Hidden History" is a diary series that explores forgotten and little-known areas of history.
When Vladimir Putin ordered his forces into Ukraine in February 2022, it was expected that it would be largely a land war, and many expected that the Russians would make quick work of the unprepared Ukrainians. Instead, the war has turned into a largely stalemated slugfest, with the Russians suffering unexpectedly high losses.
The naval aspect of the conflict was likewise expected to end quickly. Historically, while Russia (and the former Soviet Union) has always had a huge land army that made it a military power, the country’s geography has conspired to limit its naval abilities. Most of Russia’s vast coastline is not suitable for ports or harbors, being frozen in for much of the year, and Russia has never had sufficient resources to maintain a fleet large enough to cover its entire maritime border. As a result, the Russian Navy has always been divided into what are essentially local fleets located in scattered areas with suitable warm-water ports—the Pacific Fleet at Vladivostok, the Baltic Fleet at Kaliningrad, the Arctic Fleet at Murmansk, and the Black Sea Fleet at Sevastopol. Because these fleets are so far away from each other and lack suitable ports in between, they are forced to in effect act as four entirely separate navies, and are unable to easily combine and concentrate their forces.
And so when Putin launched his invasion in 2022, the Russian military knew that it would not be able to reinforce its Black Sea Fleet and would have to depend upon whatever ships were already there. These were all stationed at the military port of Sevastopol, on the Crimean Peninsula.
Under the Soviet Union during the Cold War, Sevastopol, with its deep warm-water port and its strategic location in the center of the Black Sea coastline, had been the headquarters of the Soviet Black Sea Fleet. When the USSR collapsed in 1991 and Ukraine, along with the other former Soviet Republics, became independent, Crimea became a part of Ukraine. After Ukrainian independence, the two nations had reached an agreement in which Ukraine retained a small number of ships from the former Soviet Navy and the rest went to Russia, with Moscow then leasing the harbor facilities at Sevastopol. This arrangement ended in 2014, when Russian forces invaded Crimea and annexed it, in a move that was loudly condemned by the international community. Most of the Ukrainian fleet at Sevastopol was captured by the Russians, and the Ukrainians lost several more ships during the blockade of the Sea of Azov in 2018, as the Russians were building the strategic Crimean Bridge which connected the occupied peninsula to the Russian mainland.
So when Putin invaded Ukraine in 2022, the Russians had overwhelming naval superiority. They had quietly moved six more ships into the area before the planned attack, but as soon as hostilities broke out Turkey cut off access through the Bosporus and Dardanelles Straits to all belligerent ships, preventing any further access to the Black Sea. The Russian flagship at Sevastopol was the battle cruiser Moskva, accompanied by five guided missile frigates, thirteen tank-landing attack craft, six attack submarines, and dozens of smaller support vessels and patrol boats—74 ships in total. Ukraine had only the frigate Hetman Sahaydachniy and four small missile corvettes, plus a number of smaller auxiliary ships, all based in the Ukrainian port of Odessa.
It was assumed by most that the Russians would quickly destroy them—and indeed within just a few weeks most of the smaller Ukrainian vessels had been damaged or sunk, and the Sahaydachniy had been intentionally scuttled by the Ukrainians to prevent her capture. The Russians had also landed troops on the strategic Snake Island off the Ukrainian coast, dropped several naval minefields, and set up a blockade which cut off the primary trade routes through which Ukrainian merchant vessels could bring in badly-needed supplies. They soon began bombarding Ukrainian cities. Putin’s naval position seemed secure.
Ukraine now faced the daunting task of attempting to attack the blockading Russian ships without any ships of their own. As a result, they turned to some unconventional tactics which took advantage of the few assets they still had.
The first of these was the Ukrainian supply of Soviet-era Tochka surface to surface tactical missiles. These had been designed to attack stationary land targets like command posts, artillery batteries, or supply dumps. But the Ukrainians realized that the Russian ships, sitting in their ports, were in effect unmoving ground targets, and their short-range missiles might be accurate enough to hit them. The first of these strikes happened in March 2022, a month after the invasion began, and sank the Russian attack ship Saratov at her dock in the Sea of Azov.
Just a few weeks later, the Ukrainians scored an even bigger win when two Neptune anti-ship missiles hit the Russian flagship, the battle cruiser Moskva, which was patrolling near Snake Island. The Moskva sank while being towed back to Russia.
It was a huge blow to the Russians and a huge boost to Ukrainian morale. The Ukrainians quickly set up a string of Neptune batteries along the coastline and began hitting Russian supply ships and naval vessels, including the minesweeper Ivan Golubets, and this forced the Russians to evacuate Snake Island and pull their entire fleet back out of range, some 200 miles. By June, much of the western half of the Black Sea was now off-limits to the Russians.
By 2023, military aid from the NATO powers began reaching Ukraine, and among these was the Storm Shadow air-launched cruise missile, supplied by the UK (France also added its own copy of the Storm Shadow, known as SCALP). They were intended for knocking out bridges and other land targets, but they also gave the Ukrainians the capability to hit stationary naval targets in the port of Sevastopol itself, and in September 2023 the Russian tank-landing craft Minsk was hit by a Storm Shadow while in drydock, along with the attack submarine Rostov. A few days later another barrage of Storm Shadows destroyed the Russian fleet headquarters building, and in December another of the attack landing ships, the Novocherkassk, was destroyed at a dock in eastern Crimea. With the Ukrainians now demonstrating the ability to hit any target all over Crimea, the Russians were forced to evacuate their fleet from Sevastopol and pull it all the way to Novorossysk in the western Black Sea. It was a major defeat.
Even at that distance from Ukraine, however, the remaining Russian ships posed a threat. They were armed with the Kalibre cruise missile, which at some 900 miles had range enough to hit targets in Ukraine even from Novorossysk. So the Ukrainians needed a way to deal with that threat.
The Ukrainians rushed development of a new weapon, the Magura V5 Unmanned Surface Vessel. This was in essence a small crewless powerboat, remotely operated and carrying an explosive payload of 450 pounds, which could be steered into its target by night-vision camera. Magura was designed as a multi-role vehicle, for patrolling, reconnaissance, search and rescue, or anti-mine work, but its primary role has been as an anti-ship drone. At just 18 feet in length and a speed of 50mph, it was very difficult to detect, and with a range of 500 miles, it could strike from distances much greater than the Storm Shadow or Neptune missiles. And unlike the multi-million-dollar missiles, the Magura cost only $275,000 each.
The first Magura attacks were in July 2023, when two of the drones hit the Crimea Bridge, the primary Russian supply route into Ukraine, and temporarily destroyed a section of it. A month later, another Magura travelled from the Ukrainian coast all the way across the Black Sea to Novorossysk, and hit the Russian tank-landing ship Olenegorsky Gornyak. In quick succession, the Russian corvette Samum and the patrol ship Pavel Derzhavin were hit by larger versions of the Magura known as “Sea Baby”, and in February 2024 another drone wrecked the guided missile corvette Ivanovets in western Crimea. Several weeks later, a Magura strike sunk another Russian warship, the attack ship Tsezar Kunikov (which had already earlier been damaged by a Tochka ballistic missile), and in March the missile patrol boat Sergei Kotov was sunk by yet another Magura.
In total so far the Ukrainians, without any mentionable naval fleet of their own, have managed to sink or damage 27 Russian vessels of varying size, representing about one-third of the Russian Black Sea Fleet. They have pushed the Russians almost entirely out of the western Black Sea, allowing them to continue the export trade and flow of military supplies which has been Ukraine’s economic and logistical lifeline. It is an amazingly lopsided victory.
It also has implications for other navies, including the US, as unmanned drones change the face of modern warfare.
Many analysts have already been questioning the practicality of large surface fleets, on several grounds. The US Navy, for instance, puts a lot of faith in its aircraft carrier groups (and China is desperately trying to catch up), which are essentially modified 1940s tactics. But some have pointed out that, with unmanned remotely-operated air vehicles becoming more sophisticated and capable, the very idea of an aircraft carrier (and the aircraft itself) is becoming outdated. Significantly, the latest American warplane, the B-21 bomber, was specifically designed to have the capability of being flown remotely, and some authorities have made the argument that most manned military aircraft could be replaced by remotely-flown drones. That would make the entire concept of a large aircraft carrier, and its accompanying support group, unnecessary, with a small inexpensive ship or submarine having the capability of carrying just as much firepower, delivered by drones.
The Russian losses in Ukraine have also demonstrated how severely vulnerable modern naval fleets are to small cheap unmanned drones and missiles. That has harsh implications for US carrier groups, and it also signals potential difficulties for the Chinese if they ever want to seriously contemplate a naval invasion of Taiwan and face a potential barrage of thousands of air and sea drones. Unless somebody develops an effective defense against these small missiles and drones (and so far nobody seems to have one), the entire concept of “large surface vessels” may become obsolete. And that is why every navy in the world is carefully examining what is going on in the Black Sea.
NOTE: As some of you already know, all of my diaries here are draft chapters for a number of books I am working on. So I welcome any corrections you may have, whether it's typos or places that are unclear or factual errors. I think of y'all as my pre-publication editors and proofreaders. ;)