The shift is easiest to see in one engagement: on 13 April 2022 a Ukrainian coastal battery fired two Neptune cruise missiles at the Moskva, the Black Sea Fleet flagship, and by the next day the cruiser had sunk. Russia’s defence ministry blamed ammunition exploding in an unexplained fire, said the towed ship “lost its balance”, and added, “Given the choppy seas, the vessel sank”. Ukraine said its newly fielded Neptune missiles were responsible, and unnamed US officials agreed.
What’s changing is the provenance: a domestic design. Ukrainian engineers built the Neptune against the naval threat that followed Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea; the navy took first delivery of the 300-kilometre-range missiles in March 2021, per the Kyiv Post. Behind that delivery sits a slower story, per Ukrainska Pravda’s interview-based reconstruction: state tests passed in 2020, the project frozen, money found only after Luch’s chief met President Zelenskyy, the first full system assembled on a Tatra chassis for the August 2021 parade, and the first missiles leaving the Kyiv factory only after 20 February 2022, days before the invasion. That factory has been bombed three times since.
The missile’s baptism of fire came in the invasion’s opening days: three Russian landing ships steamed toward the Mykolaiv coast, and three Neptunes were fired at them from south of Odesa. None connected, lofted high to spare the city below, but the ships turned back to Crimea. Weeks later came an uglier find: a Luch inspection team, called in after missiles kept disappearing, discovered every one carried the same faulty element, none detonating as designed. After repairs, in one military source’s telling, the next launch of two missiles was “bullseye”. Two independent sources suspected deliberate damage; a bureau source pushed back: “These are the specifics of a product.”
On the strike day, the weather did the targeting. Low clouds hung over the sea, and the battery’s basic radar, good for 18 kilometres, caught the Moskva roughly 120 kilometres out because, as sources described it, the signal had nowhere to go in the corridor between water and cloud. The cruiser had parked there in confidence, air defences reportedly silent. Two missiles left the launcher at about 16:00, just over six minutes of calculated flight ahead, and at first nobody knew whether they had struck.
The flagship carried a 510-strong crew; Russia admitted no casualties, and its parade video of around 100 sailors stood as the only evidence of survivors. Analysts counted its triple-tier air defence and six close-in weapons and asked why none of it fired. Western outlets credited allied help with the targeting; Ukrainian sources scoffed that the target was a “120-metre long mountain of iron and electronics”. The trend underneath: a nearly stillborn domestic missile sank a fleet flagship. Watch this space.
Sources
- Sunken Russian warship Moskva: What do we know?
- Sinking the Moskva: previously undisclosed details. How the Ukrainian Neptune destroyed the flagship of the Russian fleet | Ukrainska Pravda
