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- Ukraine announced on Wednesday that it had sunk a landing craft and claimed further attacks on the Russian navy.
- Ukraine, which does not have its own navy, has used drones and missiles to offset Russia’s naval power.
- The victory is a bright spot in a dark time for the Ukrainian military.
Ukraine may be struggling to counter Russia’s fierce advances on the battlefield, but it continues to achieve remarkable results in operations in the Black Sea.
Ukrainian military intelligence officials said last week that they used a naval drone to sink the Russian landing craft Caesar Kunikov near occupied Crimea.
Footage from the nighttime attack showed a drone speeding toward the ship and heavy smoke billowing from the ship.
Russia’s Ministry of Defense has not commented on the alleged attack and did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
If confirmed, this would be the 25th in an astonishing streak, and Ukraine told CNN it would have neutralized a third of Russia’s Black Sea fleet.
This is all the more impressive given that Ukraine’s navy has all but ceased to exist after Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014.
When Russia began a full-scale invasion in 2022, Ukraine scuttled its remaining flagship, the Hechman Sahaydachny, to prevent it from falling into enemy hands.
However, Ukraine has repeatedly attacked Russia’s Black Sea Fleet and the occupied Sevastopol port in Crimea, a historical center of naval power in the region.
Ukraine’s most surprising victory came in early April 2022, when it sank Russia’s Black Sea flagship “Moscow”.
Last June’s attack on Sevastopol also forced the cancellation of Navy Day celebrations, and in September Ukraine seriously damaged the submarine Rostov-on-Don and the amphibious landing ship Minsk.
Military analysts say Ukraine was able to offset the losses. Russia’s naval power was due in part to innovation and boldness.
It does not have its own warships and relies on two tools: cruise missiles and naval drones.
Ukraine has become the first country in history to effectively deploy maritime drones in naval combat, experimenting with maritime drones that can be loaded with explosives and guided to targets by remote control.
Since drones are relatively cheap and unmanned, failures are common, but successful drones can cause significant damage at minimal cost.
The corvette Ivanovets, which reportedly sank last month, caused Russia about $70 million in damage.
This would give Ukraine an “immense asymmetric advantage,” Basil Jarmond, an international security expert at Lancaster University in the UK, told Business Insider.
The reach of unmanned aircraft also exceeds that of cruise missiles, and Ukraine is rapidly advancing improvements such as equipping drones with missile launchers.
Cruise missiles such as the Storm Shadow and Harpoon, supplied by Britain and France, attack ships, but they can only be launched from up to 300 miles away and, in contrast to naval drones, are so expensive that they cannot be rationed. is necessary. .
Still, Storm Shadow was used last September in the only successful Russian submarine attack of the war so far, and the first to neutralize a Russian submarine since World War II.
“Ukraine has been very successful against the Black Sea Fleet, forcing Russia to move assets further away from Ukraine and the front lines,” Jarmond told BI. “This is operationally important, but Symbolically. ”
It’s going down, but it’s not going away.
Will Ukraine’s success in the Black Sea be the solution to the stalled Ukrainian ground offensive?
“No, it’s not,” Carnegie Endowment analyst Michael Coffman said on the “War on the Rocks” podcast in January. But he added, “It’s a huge bright spot in the story of last year, which otherwise felt like a missed opportunity.”
Ukraine cannot ensure victory against Russia through bold naval operations alone, but the attacks serve to maintain pressure in a variety of ways., According to experts.
Increasingly, they mean Russia must redistribute part of the fleet From Sevastopol to less well-equipped ports such as Feodosia in eastern Crimea and Novorossiysk on the Russian coast.
That in itself is not a huge blow. This was announced by the British Ministry of Defense. Earlier this month, Russia said it was “almost certain that it will continue to be able to carry out its three main missions in the Black Sea: long-range strike, patrol and support.”
Sidharth Kaushal, a naval expert at Britain’s Royal United Services Institute, told BI that Russia could also use airdrops to reseed minefields and support cruise missile operations from very long ranges. Ta.
But he said it is struggling to continue “economic strangulation” of Ukraine by cutting off the flow of exports from Odesa.
In fact, Ukraine is confident that it has secured a viable region. Shipping insurance transactions Last year caused a slight boom in exports in December.
It remains to be seen whether this trend will continue, but “that seems to me to be a very positive statistic,” Kaushal said.
Jarmond was more blunt: “Russia’s blockade of Ukraine can no longer be trusted.”
Ukraine’s victory boosts morale
Another practical problem is simply that of wear. Russia cannot easily replenish its Black Sea fleet with ships from other regions because of the Montreux Treaty, an 87-year-old treaty that limits what Russia and NATO can send to sea. do not have.
This means that if a ship is sunk, the Black Sea fleet will be reduced in the long term.
“We often forget that warships are the most expensive military assets in a nation’s arsenal,” Jarmond told BI.
Jarmond said another important impact was on the morale of ground forces.
After the sinking of the Ivanovets, the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine issued the following statement: short video of ukrainian soldiers They are clearly reacting to the news by dancing.
Jarmond said the impact on morale was also felt in the Kremlin.
He said the attacks on Crimea and the Black Sea Fleet “contradict President Putin’s claims that everything is normal for Russia and the people of Crimea.”
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