In Sevastopol, according to National Geographic, “the past is never past.” The city carries about 2,300 memorials and a Hero City title awarded in 1945 after a 247-day siege in the Second World War. It is also the base that gave the Russian Black Sea Fleet its home for more than two centuries, and the place where that fleet has lately been losing ground.
From Potemkin to the Soviet collapse
Prince Potemkin founded the fleet on 13 May 1783 as part of the Imperial Russian Navy. Catherine the Great had by then taken Crimea, adding 18,000 square miles and pushing Russia’s frontier to the Black Sea. The sea, in effect, made Russia a naval power.
Setbacks came early and often. At Sinop in 1853 the fleet destroyed Turkish naval forces, yet the Crimean War ended badly: allied troops landed, Sevastopol endured a 349-day siege by French, British and Turkish troops, and the 1856 Treaty of Paris barred Russian warships from the Black Sea. In the Second World War the fleet fought beside Soviet ground forces at Odessa and Sevastopol.
The Soviet collapse left a tangle. On 28 May 1997, Moscow and Kyiv signed agreements splitting the fleet, with Russia receiving title to 82% of the vessels. A 1997 deal let the fleet stay at Sevastopol until 2017, with Ukraine receiving debt relief. A later pro-Russian government in Kyiv added 25 years to the lease in return for cheaper natural gas.
The war at sea after 2022
The flagship cruiser Moskva sank on 14 April 2022, an early and humiliating loss. More followed. By February 2024, Ukraine claimed that 33 percent of the Black Sea Fleet’s warships, 24 ships and one submarine, had been disabled or destroyed. On May 18-19, 2024, Kyiv said it had hit the minesweeper Kovrovets and the missile corvette Tsiklon. The War Zone noted that satellite imagery available at the time could not confirm the damage, so those two losses rested on Ukrainian claims alone.
In July 2024, the commander of the Ukrainian Navy, Vice Admiral Oleksiy Neizhpapa, put the tally at 27 military ships destroyed or damaged, five of them lost to mines laid by naval drones near Sevastopol Bay. He told RBC-Ukraine that Russia had moved “almost all the main combat-ready ships” out of Sevastopol, mostly to Novorossiysk and some to the Sea of Azov.
The move carries a cost. Novorossiysk, Neizhpapa said, lacks a “storage and loading site for cruise missiles used by military ships for airstrikes on Ukraine.” The fleet, in his words, was “currently mainly used for logistics, control over a small part of the coastal area, and launching Kalibr cruise missiles at Ukraine.” As for Sevastopol, he said: “They were established over many decades, possibly centuries. And clearly they are now losing this hub.”
Sources
- A Jewel in Two Crowns (National Geographic)
- Russia loses naval center in Crimea (RBC-Ukraine)
- Rumors Swirl Around Attacks On Russian Black Sea Fleet Warships (The War Zone)
