Military briefing: the advance of Ukraine’s ‘mosquito navy’

Fast boats. Jet ski-borne special forces. Marine drones and long-range missiles directed at the heart of Russia’s naval pride.

Ukraine’s threat in August to break Russia’s navy in the Black Sea appeared toothless. But, more than two months on, Kyiv’s seemingly quixotic campaign to end Moscow’s “safe waters or peaceful harbours” appears to be bearing fruit.

Kyiv has pushed back Russia’s Black Sea fleet, hit its bases in Crimea, and achieved a degree of success that has eluded Kyiv’s stalled counteroffensive on land. James Heappey, Britain’s armed forces minister, last week claimed it amounted to “the functional defeat of the Russian Black Sea fleet”.

Other military officials and analysts are more cautious and warn that the Russian navy remains a formidable force that can still rain down cruise and ballistic missiles on targets across Ukraine.

Nonetheless, in the space of a few months, Ukraine has achieved a remarkable feat of arms with an essentially shipless navy, against the second-biggest marine force in the world. Its marine campaign has also brought the war to Russian-occupied Crimea for the first time since the full-scale invasion began in February 2022.

“Open oceans favour big warships, while closed seas such as the Black Sea favour small, fast and highly manoeuvrable boats, special forces operations and drones,” said Ihor Kabanenko, a former Ukrainian navy admiral. “It’s a different vision of marine war. It’s cheaper. It’s cost-effective. And Ukraine cannot anyway respond to Russia’s navy with a symmetrical approach.”

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Carefully planned operations, aided by precise targeting intelligence supplied by western spy planes flying over the international waters of the Black Sea, have been central to the achievements of what one western official called Ukraine’s “mosquito navy”.

One successful sequence began in late August when Ukrainian special forces captured the Boyko Towers gas rigs west of Crimea. Russia had fitted them out with early warning radar systems. With those gone, air defences at the Sevastopol military base were partially blinded. A storm of Ukrainian air strikes followed.

The most significant came on September 13, when a missile strike took out a Kilo-class submarine, the first Russian submarine to be destroyed in a conflict since 1945. More important still, the attack destroyed a dry dock used for repairing Russian warships.

The next day another strike destroyed a state of the art S-400 Triumph air defence system. With the threat of more Ukrainian strikes to come, Russia last week pulled out several ships usually docked in Sevastopol to safer waters further east at the Russian base of Novorossiysk, satellite imagery showed.

“The maintenance infrastructure in Sevastopol is the critical vulnerability of the Black Sea Fleet,” said Thord Are Iversen, a former Royal Norwegian Navy officer who closely follows the conflict. “Sevastopol’s capabilities are not replaceable elsewhere on a reasonable timeline and Ukraine has shown it can hit it.”

The operations have embarrassed Moscow, emboldened Kyiv, and furthered two of Ukraine’s broader strategic goals, said military officials and analysts.

The first is to support Ukraine’s land offensive by choking off the Crimean peninsula. As well as being symbolically important, Crimea’s deepwater port is critical to controlling the Black Sea, while the Kerch Bridge that links it to the Russian mainland is a vital logistical route for resupplying the Russian forces fighting on the Ukrainian mainland to the north.

“Logistics is Russia’s Achilles heel and Russia has turned the entire infrastructure of Crimea into a giant base,” said Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser in Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s administration. “It has more than 300 warehouses, training bases, and transport and logistics corridors . . . but it’s also quite difficult to defend.”

The second aim is to deny Russia control of the Black Sea and regain control of vital shipping routes after Moscow refused to renew a UN-brokered grain export deal when it expired in July.

Crucial to this strategy are long-range missiles and drones, such as the Neptune missiles that sank the flagship Moskva early last year and forced Russia to pull back its fleet from Ukraine’s coastline.

Some of these capabilities are western-supplied, such as Storm Shadow and Scalp cruise missiles from Britain and France. But many, such as the Neptunes, are homegrown. Last month, Ukraine unveiled an underwater drone, the Marichka, that can carry a 200kg warhead for 1,000km and which will be used by a newly created special naval drone unit, the 385th Separate Brigade.

“Ukraine’s denial strategy has been effective at sea as it only takes a few missile hits to deter a Russian military presence. On land, by contrast, it takes hundreds as the Russians can dig in and shelter in trenches,” said Mykola Bielieskov, research fellow at the Kyiv-based National Institute for Strategic Studies.

Ukraine’s successes have been considerable: a September 22 strike destroyed the Black Sea fleet headquarters, killing dozens of Russian officers. Ukraine’s long-range missiles and drones also pose an implicit threat to the commercial ships that carry almost a third of Russia’s oil exports and most of its grain through the Black Sea.

Yet, as on land, it remains an open question whether Ukraine’s David vs Goliath approach will be enough to defeat its more powerful naval adversary, which commands about 30 warships and six submarines.

Even if the Russian fleet permanently rebases further east, the Kalibr cruise missiles it can launch still have sufficient range to hit any target in Ukraine, Iversen said. Sea mines could also deter the commercial ships that have started to sail to Odesa to pick up Ukrainian grain cargo.

So far, none of these ships have been larger than 30,000 tonnes and “we need two 50,000-tonne ships each day for a year”, said one person close to the situation.

Britain’s foreign ministry recently warned that Russia may use mines to target civilian shipping in the Black Sea and, on Thursday, in a worrying portent, a Turkish-flagged cargo ship, the Kafkametler, hit one off the Ukrainian coast, although the vessel only suffered minor damage.

“The situation is definitely not the same as it was six months ago,” Ukraine’s deputy prime minister Oleksandr Kubrakov said on Wednesday. “[But] military parity in the Black Sea has not yet been established.”