While Ukrine’s land forces are suffering from Russia’s growing advantage in artillery fires, its naval campaign against the Black Sea Fleet is yielding spectacular results. On February 14th, less than two weeks after destroying the missile ship Ivanovets, the Ukrainians claimed to have sunk another valuable Russian warship, the Caesar Kunikov, a Ropucha-class landing ship, in the small hours of the morning. The claim was supported by video footage of the ship, which was at sea off Alupka in Crimea, being struck numerous times by Magura V5 sea drones that are operated by the country’s military intelligence services.
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This is the fourth Ropucha-class vessel that Ukraine has either destroyed or damaged possibly beyond repair in seven months. The Olenegorsky Gornyak was similarly attacked in August by sea drones; the Minsk was hit by Storm Shadow/SCALP cruise missiles in September, while undergoing repair in Sevastopol, when a Kilo-class submarine was also destroyed. In December cruise missiles struck the Novocherkassk while in port at Feodosia in Crimea, triggering a massive secondary explosion that Ukrainian intelligence sources believe was caused by its cargo of Iranian-made Shahed drones.
The targeting of the big landing ships has a clear strategic aim. They can carry up to 500 tonnes of cargo–for example, ten main battle tanks and 340 troops at the same time. They are also a roll-on/roll-off design which enables them to unload material much more quickly than a normal ship. Were the Ukrainians able to temporarily put out of action the Kerch Bridge, which links the Russian mainland with Crimea, the Ropuchas could be critical to keeping Russian forces at the front supplied. Russia has a dwindling number of Ropuchas it could transfer from either the Northern or Baltic fleets in the unlikely event that Turkey were to allow them to enter the Black Sea, but they would be equally vulnerable to Ukrainian attacks.
The sinking of the Caesar Kunikov is yet another indication of how, even without much of a conventional navy, the Ukrainians are winning the war at sea. They reckon they have taken out at least a third of the Black Sea Fleet (25 surface ships and one submarine have been destroyed; 15 are under repair) and forced the remaining vessels to operate at much greater distances from Ukraine’s coast. Sevastopol in Crimea, hitherto the main base of the Black Sea Fleet, has become too dangerous, forcing most of the fleet to retreat to Novorossiysk, a port in Russia some 450km away.
Much of this success has been the result of Ukraine’s own ingenuity in devising lethally effective sea drones. The Magura V5 (see illustration below) was developed by the state-owned Ukrainian firm SpetsTechnoExport and probably entered service about a year ago as a more mature version of earlier designs. It is about 5.5 metres long, equipped with multiple sensors and can carry a 320kg warhead 800km, accelerating to 42 knots as it gets near its target. It has a mix of different guidance systems, including GPS, wireless mesh or a waterproof first-person-view camera. Propulsion can be electric or hybrid which, with its streamlined profile and hydrodynamic structure, gives it a semi-stealth capability.
Ukraine’s sea drones have been so effective against an apparently powerful conventional navy that questions about the value of such costly forces have inevitably been raised. But it would be a mistake to extend assumptions about Russian naval incompetence to the vastly better-equipped and -trained navies of America and China.
The most important consequence so far of Ukraine’s naval campaign has been the opening up of a corridor for commercial shipping to carry the country’s grain exports. Total exports of grain, oilseeds and vegetable oils in January reportedly topped 6.4m tons, a bit higher than for the same month in 2019 and 2020, according to GrainCentral.com, a website. Instead of taking the quickest route (navigating directly through international waters to the Bosporus), bulk carrying vessels, escorted by the Ukrainian navy, hug the coastlines of Ukraine and those of NATO members Romania and Bulgaria.
Speaking at a press conference on February 14th after hearing the news about the Caesar Kunikov, Jens Stoltenberg, NATO’s secretary-general, said: “Few believed this was possible just a few months ago. But now actually, the export of grain from Ukraine takes place even without an agreement with Russia. So this shows the skills and the competence of the Ukrainian Armed Forces.”
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