Filenews 4 May 2022
By David Axe
Although the Ukrainian Navy does not currently have a single large vessel, it continues to deal significant blows to Russia's naval forces in the Black Sea. Of course the Ukrainian land army is assisting in this.
On Monday, an armed TB-2 drone struck two Russian patrol boats with laser-guided missiles, causing them serious damage if it did not completely destroy them.
In addition, the Ukrainians have sunk or neutralized two Russian Raptor class vessels, 17 metres long and equipped with guns.
Moscow's naval losses include the 186-metre-long Moskva missile cruiser, which was hit on April 13 by two Neptune anti-ship missiles of the Ukrainian Navy. Moskva was the flagship of the Russian Black Sea Fleet that listed – at the beginning of the Russian invasion – about 20 large warships.
Three weeks earlier, on 24 March, an Alligator-class landing ship belonging to the amphibious ships of the Black Sea Fleet was engulfed in flames while on the dock of the Russian-occupied city of Berdyansk in southern Ukraine. It appears that the fire was caused by a precision strike by the Ukrainian army with a Tochka ballistic missile.
Saratov, 112 metres long, quickly sank. A pair of landing craft that were anchored near the same spot were damaged and lost in manpower. The attack on the Amphibious Russian force based in Crimea was a turning point for the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which began with heavy shelling on the night of 23 February.
Having lost three amphibious vessels as well as the long-range air defence missile-equipped Moskva, the Black Sea Fleet can no longer muster large landing forces, nor protect Russian territory from air and missile attacks. This means that the Russians probably cannot open another front on Ukraine's western coastline 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, whose ranks include the reserve 5th Tank Brigade with the intact T-72 tanks, to head east and attempt to recapture the port of Kherson, which has been under Russian control since the beginning of March.
Moskva, Saratov and the other landing ships are Russia's most important naval losses, but not the only ones. On March 22, or a few days earlier, Ukrainian troops in Mariupol struck a Raptor patrolling near the coast with a Konsurs anti-tank missile.
The list is getting longer: two large Russian ships sank, another two were damaged, and three patrol boats were put out of battle if they were not completely destroyed. Before the war the Russian fleet had 7 large surface fighters, frigates and corvettes plus the flagship Moskva, as well as 6 or 7 landing ships, 6 or 7 Raptor and 6 diesel-powered electric submarines.
At the same time, Turkey controls the Bosporus Straits, the only waterway that connects the Azov and Black Seas with the Mediterranean and, consequently, with the ocean. Ankara is in favour of Ukraine's independence – after all, Bayraktar TB-2 is of Turkish manufacture – and has not allowed the Russian Navy to make up for the losses of the Black Sea Fleet by sending new ships.
All these parameters contribute to the shrinking of the Black Sea Fleet week by week and becoming less and less efficient, as it is being dealt devastating blows by Ukrainian forces. The losses of the Russian Fleet seem not to be replenished except... after the end of the war and the reopening of the Bosporus. The hit of the TB-2 on Monday demonstrates the predicament of the Black Sea Fleet. It is obvious that the Russians cannot protect their warships from airstrikes.
Moskva, with its 200-mile radars and equipped with 64 S-300 ground-to-air missiles with a range of 50 miles, was theoretically the flagship of the Russian fleet. But the cruiser could not defend itself either.
Now the Black Sea Fleet relies on a 125-metre-long triple of "Admiral Grigorovich" class frigates to protect it from the air. The frigates are among the new vessels of the Russian fleet and the largest surface warships that Russian industry can build.
The three frigates –Admiral Grigorovich", "Admiral Essen" and "Admiral Makarov" – are each equipped with 24 medium-range Buk ground-to-air missiles of up to 30 miles. Even with the support of the fighter jets and arrays of the SAM anti-aircraft missile system based in Crimea, the frigates are almost certainly finding it incredibly difficult to keep open the "umbrella" of air defence in the field of operations of the Black Sea Fleet, which extends over a 300- or 400-mile coastline from Odessa to Mariupol.
The Ukrainians have proven that they can exploit the gaps in the Russians' air defences 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 it gets close enough—at about 9 miles—to hit a 14-pound-weight MAM laser-guided missile—weighing 14 pounds—on a patrol boat.
If a Ukrainian TB-2 alone can sink a pair of Russian patrol boats, then perhaps we should ask ourselves what Kiev is capable of achieving by combining the power of drones with Neptune missiles, ballistic Tochka and anti-tank missiles against the remaining vessels of the Black Sea Fleet.
And all this before the Ukrainian Navy deployed the anti-ship missiles and drones donated by the UK and the US to Ukraine. The Russian fleet loses the war at sea... from an enemy that does not have warships.
Source: Forbes
