Last week, the last remaining warship – a Project 1135 class patrol frigate – slunk quietly out of Sevastopol harbour, which had been the main base of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet since 2014. Ukrainian Navy spokesperson Dmytro Pletenchuk suggested we should “remember this day.”
I have cautioned previously about drawing too much hope overall from maritime success in this conflict, but what does this embarrassing withdrawal mean more widely? Operationally, the loss of the port is significant although it has been a long time coming. But is the scale of the embarrassment sufficient to have a strategic effect?
From a pure maritime perspective, this is the last in a long list of humiliations suffered by the Black Sea Fleet since the 2022 invasion.
April 2022 saw the sinking of the Fleet’s flagship, the cruiser Moskva. This was the first public indication that Russian warships’ ability to defend against even basic attacks was largely absent.
October that year saw the first multiple unmanned attacks with both air and sea drones surging into Sevastopol and damaging the corvette Admiral Makarov.
September 2023 saw a complex Storm Shadow missile attack, which crippled the warship Minsk and the submarine Rostov on Don, as well as hitting the Sevastopol naval headquarters building. These strikes were enabled by special forces and missile strikes on Russian S-400 air defence systems. Russian naval leadership retreated a few miles to their backup command post at Verkhne Sadovoe only for that to be hit in turn a few days later.
At roughly the same time the Storm Shadows were wreaking havoc in Sevastopol, three Uncrewed Surface Vessels (USVs) were targeting the tanker Yaz and the arms ship Ursa Major.
In October the then UK Armed Forces Minister James Heappey described the Black Sea Fleet as ‘functionally defeated’. I felt this was slightly premature for two reasons. First, at this point, Russian attempts to restrict the outflow of grain and other exports through the Bosphorus were still working. Second, Russia still had ships and submarines operating and armed with the Kalibr missile. This is a powerful cruise weapon with the legs to cover the whole of the Black Sea, no matter how far east Russia might have to retreat. One must remember that to target a ship with a Kalibr you need to know where it is and where it’s going – knowledge which the Russians were now finding hard to obtain in the western Black Sea. Putin’s men were limping but the Black Sea remained contested.
