An undated photo of a Ukrainian Magura 5.
photograph: getty images
photograph: getty images
From The Economist by Mykolaiv region
The neverending struggle to keep out the Black Sea fleet
They look like friends messing about in boats.
They are anything but.
One jumps off a small vessel and stands in the water nudging it around, while others stand on shore watching.
A man holding a machine gun looks on, hidden from prying eyes by tall reeds.
Suddenly the boat, with no one on it, roars off into the distance, controlled remotely from a white van on the beach.
Today the meny are testing the boat, but its next mission will be to attack a Russian target.
Sea drones, or Unmanned Surface Vehicles (usvs), have transformed the war in the Black Sea and the rivers that flow into it.
Every month the technology that controls these vessels is becoming more sophisticated.
Ukraine’s forces have been credited with driving Russia’s Black Sea fleet out of the sea’s western sector, and with opening a safe corridor for vital grain exports in 2023.
But its navy has no ships of significant size.
It is now just one branch of the security services that are fighting the Russians at sea, on rivers and in reedy deltas.
This month’s summits between America, Russia and Europe haves produced no concrete agreements on ending Ukraine’s war.
On land, Ukrainian forces are limiting Russian advances on the eastern front to a slow, bloody crawl.
At sea too, it is up to Ukraine’s drones, missiles and small boats to keep the Russians out.
Back at base in the Mykolaiv region, the men from the Barracuda Battalion use a surveillance drone to hunt for movement in Oleshky, a town under Russian control on the far bank of the Dnieper river from Ukrainian-controlled Kherson.
The camera is so good that when it zooms in the screen is filled with a preening duck.
Elsewhere on the base men are making mines to place at the mouths of river inlets, which, unprotected, would allow Russian troops to sneak deep into Ukrainian territory.
In a warehouse engineers and welders are building usvs.
One has a compartment for evacuating wounded soldiers; another, a slim kamikaze vessel, is built to attack major naval or infrastructure targets.
Others can also be packed with explosives, or fitted with rocket launchers or trays that carry flying drones close to their target.
The battalion belongs not to the navy but to the army.
On the water, Ukraine is defended by a network of different organisations, co-operating loosely.
Ukraine’s military-intelligence service, the HUR, and its civilian equivalent, the sbu, run their own usv operations, sometimes without informing the navy.
The heads of the intelligence agencies, unlike the top navy brass, are important political players and are often better at getting publicity for their operations.
Until 2014 Ukraine’s navy was based in Crimea.
When Russia seized the peninsula most of Ukraine’s ships were lost; two-thirds of its personnel defected.
At the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022 the navy lost many of its remaining vessels, including its last frigate, scuttled to stop it falling into Russian hands.
Today 80% of Ukraine’s coastline is under Russian control.
Yet the navy succeeded in 2022 in preventing Russia from staging any major amphibious landings.
In April 2022 it sank the Russian heavy cruiser Moskva, the Black Sea fleet’s flagship, with home-made anti-ship missiles.
This was a huge morale boost.
After that Ukrainian forces drove the Russian navy out of its bases in Crimea.
According to Hanna Shelest, an analyst in Odessa, the main successes have come when the navy and other services co-operate.
The sbu uses usvs and launches raids, but it needs naval experts to advise on navigation.
(In addition, for major operations Ukraine’s usvs rely on American satellite intelligence; they would suffer greatly if America withdrew that support.)
Dmytro Pletenchuk, the navy’s spokesman, notes that naval units are also fighting on land next to soldiers.
map: the economist
Tapping a map of the Black Sea, Andrii Ryzhenko, a former naval captain, cautions that driving the Russians out of its western part does not mean Ukraine controls it.
The grain corridor hugs the coast, and small Ukrainian vessels hunt for mines to keep it clear.
But neither Ukrainian nor Russian vessels can sail in the rest of this “grey zone”, he says.
The Russians can still attack Odessa with missiles and drones, and the river ports of Mykolaiv and Kherson remain inaccessible for navigation.
Russia is developing its own USVs, and has become far better at countering Ukrainian ones.
In 2018 Mr Ryzhenko took part in an expert working group that argued that Ukraine did not need big new ships.
Instead it needed a “mosquito fleet” of small, fast boats and USVs.
His vision has become reality.
Since 2022 some 100 speedy smaller craft have been delivered by allies, he says.
Naval men around the world are watching the war in the Black Sea for lessons on how to defend their ships, which have evidently become much more vulnerable to USV attack.
For Ukraine the effectiveness of naval drones against heavy warships has been reassuring.
For its allies it is worrying.
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