Michael Bond @HelloMrBond
In light of the attack on the #Russian navy’s #Moskva, this article published hours before the strike is prescient:
“These anti-ship missiles will either annihilate the Russian Navy in the Black Sea or push it far away to near-irrelevance”
smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/why-russias-navy-ukraine-war-doomed-or-irrelevant
Why Russia’s Navy in Ukraine War is Doomed (or Irrelevant)
Ukraine is about to get (or maybe now just started receiving) Western anti-ship missiles and may even have its own advanced anti-ship missiles almost ready for deployment. A small number of such missiles could wipe out all of Russia’s big surface warships near Ukraine in the Black Sea and Sea of Azov or push Russian ships out of range and too far away to be able to meaningfully support Russia’s war effort. This missile technology in the hands of Ukraine’s competent and adaptive fighters will be a game-changer much like Javelin and other anti-tank missiles have been for Ukraine against Russian armor thus far in Putin’s failing war.
and
Russia’s Big Ships Near Ukraine: Easy Targets…
Unlike armies, with thousands of soldiers, hundreds of units, and thousands of subunits, navies are mostly tied to a very finite number of vessels, almost always dozens or hundreds of vessels per navy at most.
Meaning: take out the ships, and the navy pretty much does not exist.
Russia has cannibalized its other three fleets (Northern Fleet, Baltic Fleet, and Pacific Fleet) and its one flotilla (the Caspian Flotilla) to reinforce the Black Sea Fleet and support its Ukraine effort, and, with Turkey closing the Bosporus and Dardanelles straits to the Mediterranean in early March to incoming military vessels, that Caspian Flotilla is the only possible source of reinforcements to what is in the Black Sea, coming in though canal from the Caspian Sea
As far as sizable surface ships in the Black Sea, by mid-March there were only twenty-one, according to a “senior defense official”: just twelve naval-combat-focused ships along with nine amphibious assault ships, accompanied by numerous far smaller patrol and support boats and, of course, submarines that are harder to track.
^But that total was before the daring Ukrainian strike
on the morning of March 24, which mysteriously destroyed a large Russian amphibious ship, the now sunk^
Alligator class Saratov, docked in the eastern Ukrainian Russian-occupied port of Berdyansk. Two other large amphibious ships, the Caesar Kunikov and Novocherkassk, were damaged and fled the port.
So, scratch one, Russia is down now to just twenty major surface vessels.
That is not a large number.
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If (and hopefully when) Neptunes can be eventually deployed, a large portion of the entire Black Sea, including most of Russian-occupied Crimea—where many of Russia’s naval vessels are based and resupplied
—as well as the Sea of Azov, would be vulnerable. And if Ukraine is able to push Russian forces in the south back closer to Crimea, even missiles with shorter range could threaten Russia’s ability to dock its ships and the entirety of Crimea more of the Black Sea could be vulnerable.
Soon, Russia’s navy will almost certainly have to turn tail and run to the southern Black Sea, unable to offer meaningful support in the ground war, or even move to port back in Russia proper (as in, the non-illegally occupied/annexed parts of Ukraine) to avoid near-total destruction. If there will be any problems or delays deploying the Neptunes, NATO should ensure longer-range anti-ship missiles, including some of the Norwegian NSMs, are provided to Ukraine so they can either destroy Russia’s navy or render it irrelevant, putting more Russian ships under range or pushing them even further back than would be the case with just, say, Harpoon missiles.
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^A True Game-Changer: “Bye-Bye Russian Navy!“
These anti-ship missiles will either annihilate the Russian Navy in the Black Sea or push it far away to near-irrelevance (other than its ability to affect commercial shipping). This will absolutely humiliate Putin and the Russians, crush Russian morale, severely hamper the entirety of the logistical situation for the Russians as well as overall Russian efforts in southern Ukraine and on its coast, allow far more supplies to reach Ukraine’s people and military far more easily, perhaps destroy any hope of building a land bridge for Russia to Crimea (let alone one to Moldova), and also severely hamper Russia’s efforts to secure the Donbas. It could even help precipitate the collapse of the entire Russian war effort and perhaps even mutiny and revolt in the Russian military
If you scoff at such an idea, consider the last time Russia suffered such a humiliating naval defeat, in the 1904-1905 Russo-Japanese war, that defeat precipitated massive loss of prestige, unrest, military revolt, and revolution in 1905 and was a major nail in the coffin of Tsarist Russia; among the units that mutinied was the crew of the battleship Potemkin, stationed at—of all places—Odesa, an event immortalized in Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 film.