“By operating below the waterline, UUVs have an obvious advantage in terms of stealth,” wrote Scott Savitz, a senior engineer at the nonprofit RAND Corporation in California. Its defenses against underwater threats – ship- and helicopter-mounted sonars and torpedoes – are minimal. The Black Sea Fleet has plenty of guns and missiles for shooting down missiles and blowing up drone boats. 13, just two weeks after Ukrainian firm Ammo Ukraine launched Marichka, a prototype unmanned undersea vehicle, or UUV.įor the Kremlin, it was an ominous debut. Most recently, a swarm of Ukraine’s drone boats – guided by GPS – chased down at least three of the Black Sea Fleet’s smaller vessels, and apparently damaged two of them. Other vessels have suffered heavy damage. And in late 2022, Kyiv’s forces sent their new $250,000 robotic boats into battle for the first time, in an assault on the Black Sea Fleet at its main base in Sevastopol, in Russian-occupied Crimea.īetween the drone boats and the missiles, the Russians have lost their cruiser, three amphibious ships, a submarine, a supply ship and several patrol boats and landing craft. Then they added land-based cruise missiles – both locally-produced and American-donated examples. When the Ukrainians fought back against the Black Sea Fleet, they initially did so with land-based ballistic missiles. The amphibious ship sailed into hiding somewhere near the mouth of the Dnipro River.īy March 2022, the Ukrainian navy was a ship-less navy. Ukrainian sailors quickly scuttled Hetman Sahaidachny in her home port of Odesa. The Ukrainian fleet went to war with just two large warships, the frigate Hetman Sahaidachny plus an aging amphibious ship. The Russian fleet initially succeeded in doing both. With no undersea threat, the Black Sea Fleet armed itself to control the sea’s surface and attack targets on land. The Ukrainian navy’s only submarine, the 1970-vintage Zaporizhzhia, was hopelessly obsolete and dangerously unsafe for her crew when she finally decommissioned in 2014. Submarines weren’t a problem for the Russians, at first. And the ships it has, which originally included one missile cruiser, a handful of missile frigates and several dozen smaller missile corvettes plus a dozen or so amphibious assault ships, aren’t well-equipped for anti-submarine warfare. It has to win the war with the ships it has – or lose. So the Black Sea Fleet cannot receive reinforcements from the rest of the Russian navy. Turkey controls the strait, and has not allowed any warships to pass through since Russia escalated its war on Ukraine starting in February 2022. There’s just one route from the world’s oceans into the Black Sea: the Bosphorus Strait. The Black Sea Fleet labours under a significant disadvantage. If Ukraine can solve a few key technical problems – in particular, how to guide its new drone subs – it could escalate its assault on the Black Sea Fleet, and send many more of its ships to the bottom.Īnd in so doing, the Ukrainians might just introduce a whole new kind of naval warfare. While the Black Sea Fleet has defenses against missiles and boats, albeit imperfect ones, it doesn’t have many good ways of countering a tiny explosive submarine. In late August, a Ukrainian company revealed the country’s first one-way drone submarine: an 18-foot-long, torpedo-like robot that could haul hundreds of pounds of explosives over a distance of up to 600 miles and strike Russian warships where they’re most vulnerable: below the waterline. In the 20 months since Russia widened its war on Ukraine, Ukrainian forces have bled the fleet with ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and explosives-laden drone boats.Īnd the fleet’s problems are about to get a lot worse.
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