The Russians lose at sea to an enemy without warships

By David Ax

Although the Ukrainian Navy does not currently have a single large vessel, it continues to deliver significant blows to Russia’s naval forces in the Black Sea. Of course, the Ukrainian army is assisting in this.

On Monday, an armed TB-2 drone struck two Russian patrol boats with laser-guided missiles, causing severe damage if not completely destroyed.

In addition, the Ukrainians have sunk or neutralized two Russian Raptor-class vessels, 17 meters long and equipped with artillery.

Moscow’s naval casualties include the 186-meter Moskva cruiser, which was hit on April 13 by two Ukrainian Navy Neptune anti-ship missiles. Moskva was the flagship of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, which numbered about 20 large warships at the beginning of the Russian invasion.

Three weeks earlier, on March 24, an Alligator-class amphibious ship belonging to the amphibious vessels of the Black Sea Fleet was engulfed in flames while docking in the Russian-occupied city of Berdyansk in southern Ukraine. The fire appears to have been triggered by a precision strike by the Ukrainian army with a Tochka ballistic missile.

The 112-meter-long Saratov sank quickly. A pair of amphibious vessels anchored near the same site suffered damage and loss of manpower. The attack on the Crimean-based amphibious Russian force was a turning point for the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which began with heavy bombardment on the night of 23 February.

Having lost three amphibious vessels as well as the long-range Moskva equipped with long-range air defense missiles, the Black Sea Fleet can no longer assemble large amphibious forces, nor can it protect Russian territory from air and missile attacks. This means that the Russians may not be able to open another front on the west coast of Ukraine in order to attack the strategically important port of Odessa: Ukraine’s main exit to the sea.

Such a development would give freedom of movement to the defenders of Odessa, including the reserve 5th Armored Brigade with intact T-72 tanks, to head east and attempt to retake the port of Hersonissos under Russian control.

The Moskva, Saratov and other landing craft are Russia’s most important naval casualties, but they are not the only ones. On March 22, or a few days earlier, Ukrainian troops in Mariupol fired a Konsurs anti-tank missile at a Raptor patrolling the coast.

The list goes on and on: two large Russian ships sank, two more were damaged, and three patrol boats were put out of action if not completely destroyed. Before the war, the Russian fleet had 7 large surface fighters, frigates and corvettes plus the Moskva flagship, as well as 6 or 7 landing craft, 6 or 7 Raptors and 6 diesel-electric submarines.

At the same time, Turkey controls the Bosphorus Strait, the only waterway that connects the Azov and Black Seas to the Mediterranean and, consequently, to the ocean. Ankara is in favor of Ukraine’s independence – a Turkish-made Bayraktar TB-2 – and has not allowed the Russian Navy to make up for lost Black Sea Fleet by sending new ships.

All these parameters contribute to the shrinking of the Black Sea Fleet week by week and to it becoming less and less effective, as it receives catastrophic blows from the Ukrainian forces. It seems that the losses of the Russian Fleet will not be compensated until after the end of the war and the reopening of the Bosphorus. The TB-2 strike on Monday demonstrates the plight of the Black Sea Fleet. It is obvious that the Russians can not protect their warships from air raids.

The Moskva, with its 200-mile radar and equipped with 64 S-300 surface-to-air missiles with a range of 50 miles, was theoretically the flagship of the Russian fleet. But the cruiser could not even defend itself.

Now the Black Sea Fleet relies on a triple frigate “Admiral Grigorovich” class, 125 meters long, to protect it from the air. The frigates are among the new vessels of the Russian fleet and the largest surface warships that can be built by Russian industry.

The three frigates – “Admiral Grigorovich”, “Admiral Essen” and “Admiral Makarov” – are each equipped with 24 medium-range Buk surface-to-air missiles of up to 30 miles. Even with the support of fighter jets and arrays of the Crimean-based SAM anti-aircraft missile system, the frigates are almost certainly having a hard time keeping the air defense “umbrella” open in the Black Fleet’s a 300 or 400 mile coastline from Odessa to Mariupol.

The Ukrainians have shown that they can take advantage of the gaps in the Russian air defense at sea. A TB-2 with a wingspan of 12 meters is not a huge target, but a well-equipped, trained and alert fleet must be able to locate and shoot it down before approaching enough – at about 9 miles – to strike with laser-guided MAM rocket – weighing 14 pounds – a patrol boat.

If a Ukrainian TB-2 alone can sink a pair of Russian patrol boats, then we may be wondering what Kyiv can achieve by combining drone power with Neptune missiles, Tochka ballistic missiles and anti-tank missiles against the remaining ships. Black Sea Fleet.

And all this before the Ukrainian Navy developed the anti-ship missiles and drones donated by the United Kingdom and the United States to Ukraine. The Russian fleet is losing the war at sea … to an enemy that has no warships.