Ukraine’s Sea Drones Alter Balance of Power in Black Sea

ISTANBUL—Ukraine has altered the military balance of power in the Black Sea in recent months, using sea drones to strike back at Russia’s more powerful navy and threaten Russian military supply lines and shipping lanes.

Small, inexpensive and difficult to defend against, the homemade drones have allowed Ukraine to open up a new front in the war, attacking strategic military targets and symbols of Russia’s dominance in the Black Sea—including the headquarters of Moscow’s fleet in occupied Crimea and a bridge connecting the peninsula to Russia. Ukraine says the drones are developed and produced domestically, but has been secretive about the details of the program.

The strikes have intensified in recent days as Ukraine has retaliated against a wave of Russian missile and drone strikes on Ukrainian ports on the Black Sea and threats to attack civilian ships heading to Ukraine. Russia also withdrew in July from an international agreement that allowed Ukraine to resume its Black Sea grain exports last year, imperiling a key link in the global food-supply chain.

Since Russia exited the agreement, Ukrainian sea drones have demonstrated their ability to strike across a swath of the Black Sea, ramming a Russian landing ship in a navy shipyard in the port city of Novorossiysk, more than 360 miles from Odesa, and an oil tanker that carried jet fuel for Moscow’s armed forces. Earlier in July, Moscow also said a Ukrainian drone struck a Russian reconnaissance ship in the middle of the Black Sea.

Military analysts say the surface drones could change the complexion of the war by forcing Russia to commit more resources to protecting its ports, warships and cargo ships that it uses to transport weapons, fuel and other supplies for its military. The attacks are also expected to further raise shipping and insurance costs for vessels headed to Russia’s vital Black Sea ports. In concert with recent aerial drone attacks that have hit Moscow, the drones show Kyiv’s ability to strike far beyond the theater of war inside Ukraine.

“I think the message is to say nothing is safe,” said Gabriela Iveliz Rosa Hernández, a research associate with the Arms Control Association who studies Eastern European militaries. “It’s Ukraine reminding Russia that there is no normality.”

Ukraine isn’t making much progress with a counteroffensive launched earlier this summer aimed at reclaiming land occupied by Russia earlier in the war. The operation is proceeding more slowly than expected as Ukrainian forces run into heavily fortified Russian positions and miles upon miles of minefields. Air- and sea-drone attacks behind Russian lines have allowed Ukraine to open up new fronts in the war while the fighting moves slowly on the main battlefields.

The sea drones, also known as unmanned surface vehicles, are only 18 feet long—no larger than a small fishing boat—with a range of up to 800 kilometers, or about 500 miles, and can operate for up to 60 hours at a time, according to the Ukrainian government. Each vessel costs a quarter of a million dollars, a fraction of the tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars it costs to build the larger Russian ships that have been targeted by the drones.

The vessels’ small size makes them difficult to defend against in much the same way that aerial drones pose a challenge for air defenses: They are hard to detect. Once the small drones approach a larger ship, the steep angles involved in shooting at the vessels pose a challenge, experts say.

“A small vessel that has relatively little profile is hard to hit. If there are a number of them in some kind of a swarm, that makes it that much harder,” said Scott Savitz, a senior engineer at the Rand Corp., a U.S.-government funded think tank, who has written studies on uncrewed vessels.

“What we’re seeing is Ukraine instituting partial sea denial,” he said, referring to Ukraine’s aim to limit the Russian navy’s range of operations in the Black Sea.

For Ukraine, the drone attacks are the latest in a series of moves that have cut down the firepower of the Russian Black Sea fleet and derailed a possibly key element of Moscow’s plans for the invasion. Earlier in the war, Ukraine used antiship missiles, aerial drones and sea mines to push back a possible Russian landing force from the area around Odesa. Those same weapons helped it reclaim the small but strategic Snake Island in the Black Sea near the mouth of the Danube River and sink the flagship of the Russian fleet, the missile cruiser Moskva.

The so-called “mosquito fleet” of Ukrainian-made drones is the result of a wartime effort by Ukraine to build up its own naval forces, which were devastated when Russia seized Crimea and by the recent invasion. Though the Russian Black Sea fleet has been based in Crimea for more than two centuries, Ukraine received only one-fifth of the fleet’s ships during the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. It lost 80% of those when Russia occupied Crimea in 2014. Ukraine was forced to scuttle its flagship in the port city of Mykolaiv in March last year to prevent it from falling into Russian hands.

Dozens of countries have manufactured armed and unarmed sea drones for years, but the Ukraine war is the first time they have been used at such a large scale. Yemen’s Houthi rebels have carried out a series of attacks using apparent uncrewed vessels in recent years, analysts say, killing two sailors on a Saudi warship in 2017.

In October, Ukraine used sea drones to attack the headquarters of the Russian Black Sea fleet in Sevastopol in Crimea. The attack, using a swarm of several drones, damaged a Russian minesweeper, according to Moscow’s Ministry of Defense. Days later, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced a fundraising drive to build up a fleet of the uncrewed vessels.

The attacks have shown the potential to affect Russia’s economy, which increasingly relies on its Black Sea ports for exports of oil, grain and other commodities. Data from Lloyd’s List Intelligence showed that a drone attack on the Crimean bridge in July severely reduced the number of visits by ships to the Sea of Azov, just north of the bridge. Port calls fell by more than half in Novorossiysk following an attack on the port in November.

The Ukrainian government rarely comments on the drone attacks. Following the attack that rammed a Russian oil tanker working for the Kremlin’s military over the weekend, Zelensky mentioned what he said were the “fair results” of work by Ukraine’s defense industry.

“He, who brings problems to others, must feel what problems are,” he said.

The Ukrainian government recently unveiled a new drone called the Magura 5. A model of the vessel was put on display at a defense expo in Istanbul in July. Turkey is also a world leader in drone manufacturing and its Bayraktar TB-2 drones were instrumental in Ukraine’s early resistance to the Russian invasion.

Turkish, Western and United Nations diplomats say they are working to bring Russia back into the Black Sea grain initiative, which would calm tensions in the region and allow some civilian shipping to resume to Ukraine’s major Black Sea ports. In the absence of an agreement, uncrewed drones have given Ukraine the ability to push back on Russian attacks on its ports.

“The purpose of such operations is to destroy Russia’s military capabilities in the Black Sea, and in the future to restore freedom of maritime navigation in the Black Sea,” said Olya Korbut, a researcher with the Center for European Policy Analysis in Washington and the Institute for Black Sea Strategic Studies in Kyiv.

Write to Jared Malsin at [email protected]