This seems like a pretty significant achievement
Especially given that Ukraine doesn’t even really have a navy. For all intends and purposes Russia should’ve been able to dominate thr Blacksea with their naval dominance.
This is an indication of modern warfare: small guided munitions are extremely effective and the days of “force projection” using large vehicles may be over.
This war is going to completely reshape military doctrine this decade. We haven’t really had a war where both sides can utilize state-of-the-art technology since, what, Vietnam? A lot has changed since then, particularly in terms of computational power.
We still haven’t had a war with both sides having state of the art technology, or has Russia been hiding something this whole time?
Actually, I think the Russians have avoided deploying their Armatas or Su-57s in any meaningful capacity… so to some degree yes, but I don’t believe that they’d have any meaningful impact given the shift in military doctrine towards swarms of drones. Russia also hasn’t deployed their conventional ICBMs and scramjet missiles for obvious reasons (because a conventional ICBM strike is indistinguishable from a nuclear one).
Meanwhile, we’ve seen state-of-the-art tanks in the Challenger 2 and Leopard 2A4 achieve no success on the battlefield and the Patriot system incapable of intercepting drones hundreds of kilometers into Ukrainian territory. We’re yet to see how the F-16 will fare and probably won’t see F-16s in combat until mid-2024.
The most effective weapons in this conflict have been short-range guided munitions: HIMARS, Javelins, FABs, Lancets, Shaheds, FPV drones.
the Russians have avoided deploying their Armatas or Su-57s in any meaningful capacity
mostly because their numbers are scant.
Agree with your premise, but don’t forget to add DPICM to that list, it’s helping sustain overall artillery fires at high tempo. Russia’s trying to buy shells from North Korea, ugh…
I also have doubts at this point that many RU tube artillery systems are worth shit - the volumes they’ve tried to sustain throughout the conflict don’t come at a cost of just rounds fired, but barrels used up. Unless those wiley bears have figured out a way to quickly rehabilitate/recycle old tubes into new, we’re going to see RU tube arty rapidly decrease in effectiveness in both accuracy and range.
People have been projecting that since the start of the war given the rate at which Russia is burning through their artillery shell stockpiles. So far, we’ve seen nothing, which indicates that either Russia is able to operate their artillery for longer or able to repair it more quickly. For what it’s worth, old Soviet doctrine probably prioritized easy maintenance over how long it lasted.
thr Blacksea
Never heard of it. Is it near Blackpool? \fp
Well this is an internet game changer
Oh, wow. Ok, then what’s the point of holding Crimea? And then, what’s the point of the whole war anyways? Make peace, go home!
Full article
Naval Defeat: Russia’s Black Sea Fleet Has Abandoned its Critical Crimea Base
A major aim of Kremlin’s war was to guarantee security for Russian warships operating from the Sevastopol base in the Black Sea. That is in ruins as its fleet retreats from an opponent without a navy.
by Stefan Korshak | October 5, 2023, 3:06 pm
In a naval defeat of historical proportions, Russia’s Black Sea Fleet (BSF) has evacuated almost all of its warships from the Sevastopol naval base in occupied Crimea and moved them to what it considers to be safer ports on the Russian mainland out of reach of Kyiv missile and drone strikes.
Satellite images published by open-source naval observers such as MT Anderson show that at least ten major fighting vessels that were previously stationed in Russia’s massive Sevastopol naval base are now moored at piers in the smaller port Novorossiysk, in Russia’s Kuban region.
The imagery suggests the Kremlin has indefinitely ended the use of the strategically located Crimean peninsula as its Black Sea base. Major BSF vessels identified in Novorossiysk include two missile-carrying frigates, three missile-carrying submarines, and five amphibious assault ships.
Six smaller missile boats and several auxiliary ships were reported to have left Sevastopol and are now based in the civilian port of Feodosia, about 150 kilometers east of Sevastopol. Novorossiysk is on the eastern Black Sea coast about 350 kilometers east of Sevastopol.
David Kezerashvili, who served as Georgia’s defense minister during the 2008 Russian invasion, said: “Ukraine has been hugely successful at targeting Russia’s navy in Crimea, with the result being that the Kremlin now feels it needs to relocate.”
Ukrainian media first spotted Russian warships withdrawing from Sevastopol, most of which later appeared in Novorossiysk, on Sep. 22-23.
The Kremlin’s effective abandonment of Sevastopol’s naval facilities followed a series of devastating Ukrainian missile and drone strikes against shore defenses and port infrastructure in recent weeks.
Among the most spectacular was a Ukrainian special forces raid on Aug. 24 which hit an early-warning radar and an S-400 air defense system on the Crimea’s extreme western shore near Cape Tarankhut.
A Sept. 13 strike by at least eight Anglo-French precision-guided cruise missiles exploited a gap created in Russian air defenses over Crimean air space to hit Sevastopol’s naval base, targeting warships tied up in military drydocks.
Although the Kremlin has claimed the damage will all be repaired, independent analysts have generally concluded that Ukrainian missiles effectively destroyed a missile-carrying submarine and an amphibious assault ship, and rendered all three of the BSF’s drydocks incapable of undertaking major ship repairs for months.
A follow-up cruise missile strike on Sept. 22 blasted the BSF’s headquarters in Sevastopol, detonating inside the building while, according to both Russian and Ukrainian news reports, a senior BSF staff meeting was in progress. At least 60 Russian staff and command officers were killed in the strike and dozens more injured, most reports said.
Since Russia’s February 24, 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the BSF lost one of its original five major warships – significantly, its flagship the cruiser Moskva to an April 2022 Ukrainian anti-ship missile strike. Other Russian fleet elements known to have been sunk, destroyed or put out of action for months include at least two more heavy amphibious assault ships, a pair of landing ships, a rescue tug, a missile-armed corvette, and a minesweeper.
Abandoning the Sevastopol base is a tacit signal of acknowledgment by the Kremlin that it can no longer protect its fleet in its main Crimea base. With the Russian navy now forced to operate hundreds of kilometers further away from Ukraine, its ability to interfere with Ukrainian civilian grain exports from the ports of Odesa and Chernomorsk, or to use ship-based missiles to bombard Ukrainian cities, will be reduced but probably not ended, analysts say.
Aslan Bzhaniya, leader of the renegade Georgian region of Abkhazia, in comments carried by the Russian official news agency “Izvestiya” on Thursday and widely repeated in Russian and Ukrainian media, said Russian authorities plan to compensate for loss of capacity in Sevastopol with the construction of a new naval port in Ochamchire, a former seaside tourist resort, 45 kilometers south of the Abkhazian city of Sukhumi.
Abkhazia, with the strong support of Russian troops and weapons, gained de facto independence from Georgia in fighting which ended in 1993. The war ruined Ochamchire’s waterfront and in doing so devastated Abkhazia’s main cash industry which offered economical seaside vacations to residents of the former Soviet Union.
The Kremlin at the time said it was helping protect ethnic Abkhazians from Georgian attacks. Tbilisi said Moscow instigated the conflict to widen its control in the eastern Black Sea and to undermine Georgian sovereignty.
Imperial Russia annexed Crimea from its native Tartar tribesmen in 1783 and built the BSF home base in Sevastopol in 1804. Putin’s Russian Federation illegally annexed Crimea from independent Ukraine in 2014. At the time Moscow was renting shore basing privileges for its warships from the Ukrainian government.
Putin justified the annexation with arguments that Russia needed total control of the naval facilities in Ukrainian Crimea as a matter of Russian national security.
Kezerashvili has warned the rebasing of Russia’s fleet to ports adjacent to Georgia marked a dangerous broadening of the Russo-Ukraine war, that now threatened regional security thousands of kilometers beyond Ukraine’s borders.
“Putin is also sending a signal to the West that it needs to stay out of Georgia. The nightmare scenario for the West is that Russia starts launching attacks on Ukraine from territory that is legally Georgia’s, or alternatively that Ukraine feels obliged to strike first in Georgia’s direction,” Kezerashvili said.
“There is an urgent need now for the Western allies – the European Union, US and NATO – to act fast to prevent the spread of Russian influence in the region,” he said.
