“I can say that the Black Sea fleet operations have been greatly complicated, if not paralyzed,” said Dmytro Pletenchuk, spokesman for Ukraine’s naval forces. He said it publicly in February, describing a fleet that, in his telling, entered the war with about 80 warships, spanning big combatants, landing craft, submarines, patrol craft and mine hunters.
Pletenchuk has become the officer who puts numbers on the losses. Ukraine has no real navy to speak of. Business Insider noted that it has fought with uncrewed sea drones and long-range missiles aimed at ships, and that the barrage pushed Russia to move warships away from its prized home port of Sevastopol in Crimea. The same account said the campaign let Ukraine restart grain shipments across the Black Sea.
The count
In an interview with RBC-Ukraine on June 17, Pletenchuk said a third of the fleet was out of action, whether destroyed or damaged. The armed forces had officially destroyed 28 Russian ships, he said, and more than 10 others were under repair. The tally includes small boats, and the Russians have roughly a dozen and a half of those. He named the flagship, the Moskva, as the only first-rank vessel lost, followed by the submarine Rostov-on-Don, the Sergey Kotov, the Ivanovets, the Vasily Bekh, four large landing ships and others.
The record shows how it started. The Saratov, a large landing ship, was reportedly sunk at the occupied port of Berdiansk on March 24, 2022, by a Tochka-U ballistic missile. On April 14, 2022, the Moskva went down after Neptune missiles launched from shore struck it, which Business Insider described as the first time since the Russo-Japanese War that an enemy sank a Russian flagship. The Vasily Bekh, a rescue tug, took two Harpoon missiles on June 17, 2022. Business Insider called it the first use of Western-made anti-ship weapons against a Russian vessel. And on October 29 the minesweeper Ivan Golubets reportedly suffered damage when Sevastopol came under heavy attack. Moscow called it minor. A Ukrainian official quoted by the New York Times thought the ship might never be repaired.
Damaged, not always dead
Pletenchuk is careful on this point. Many ships still serving have also been hit, he said, naming Admiral Essen and Admiral Makarov, both frigates, and some have since been repaired. Repairs on the large landing ships, built to the 775 project in Poland, are harder, since the Poles refuse to service them and Moscow’s attempts to buy substitute parts around the sanctions have run into trouble. In his view, Russia will not rush to fix them.
The two frigates came up again in a later interview about the strike on Novorossiysk. Pletenchuk said they were primary targets because Russia uses them to shell Ukraine. Both had already been damaged several times, some of them three, by sea drones and Neptune missiles, yet stayed afloat and went back into service. Among the fleet’s missile carriers, he said, there are five ships and two submarines.
Sources
- Ukraine has devastated Russia's Black Sea Fleet without even having a real navy | Business Insider (Yahoo)
- Ukraine has devastated Russia's Black Sea Fleet without even having a real navy (continued) | Business Insider (Yahoo)
- Ukraine disables one third of Russia's Black Sea Fleet – Navy spokesman / The New Voice of Ukraine
- The Makarov and Essen Hit: Ukrainian NAVY Spokesman Exposes Russia's Defeat Near Novorossiysk — Interview with Dmytro Pletenchuk – Freedom
