Even though Russia’s navy has been embarrassed by Ukrainian attacks in the Black Sea, and has suffered heavy and much-publicized losses, it remains more potent than is commonly assumed. Maintaining a global naval capability will continue to be a strategic priority for the Russian leadership.
Ukraine’s successes against the Black Sea Fleet since 2022 should not obscure the important reality that the Russian Federation Navy (RFN) is no less dangerous to NATO than it was prior to the Ukraine war. Without question, Russia has experienced significant setbacks at sea. But the navy’s force of modern vessels capable of global power projection has grown, and the experience of war has provided critical combat lessons for the larger fleet. While the navy faces rougher waters ahead when Moscow begins recapitalizing its armed forces over the next decade, the RFN will remain a critical component of Russia’s nuclear and conventional strategic deterrence force.
State of play
In 2023, Ukraine inflicted a series of cascading tactical defeats on the RFN that resulted in the loss of Russian initiative, the breaking of the RFN’s de facto naval blockade against Ukraine, and the ejection of the Black Sea Fleet’s surface warships from the western Black Sea. Daring Ukrainian commando raids, well-planned long-range precision strikes, and much-vaunted attacks by unmanned surface vessels (USVs) ensured that Ukraine’s lifeline to the sea remained open. The result was an important strategic victory for Kyiv.
An oft-misunderstood aspect of the naval war in the Black Sea is Russia’s attempt at maritime economic coercion of Ukraine. While Russia’s actions never strictly amounted to a declared blockade – Russia never actually declared war – they functioned as such. However, the Black Sea Fleet’s restriction of Ukrainian maritime trade is better described as a ‘blockade-in-being’ because it relied almost entirely on the threat of interdiction rather than on actual blockade operations. Such a threat, which Russia is certainly capable of enforcing, was adequate to restrict anything other than bulk dry cargo ships allowed under the Black Sea Grain Initiative (BSGI). After the BSGI collapsed, Russian threats were made hollow by the threat of war with NATO when cargo ships were re-routed through Romanian and Bulgarian territorial waters. Today, Ukrainian grain transits meet or exceed pre-war totals. Taken together, these events and responses provide important insights into Russian risk calculus vis-à-vis NATO.
Ukrainian forces were particularly effective against Russian amphibious capabilities, severely damaging or destroying five of the 11 medium-sized Russian amphibious ships (landing ship–tanks, or LSTs) in the Black Sea. Russian naval infantry, though much better trained and equipped than many army formations, have also taken savage losses in the ground campaign. It is likely to be a decade before the RFN is able to recoup these catastrophic losses to its expeditionary amphibious forces.
With two important exceptions, most of Ukraine’s accomplishments have come against naval vessels that were either very old or very limited in capability.
But with two important exceptions, most of Ukraine’s accomplishments have come against naval vessels that were either very old or very limited in capability. Indeed, despite Ukraine’s laudable success, the RFN has lost none of its blue-water combat capability. Of the 21 corvette-sized or larger combat vessels damaged or destroyed in the war, only one, the aged cruiser Moskva, could be considered capable of distant overseas power projection. In short, Ukrainian success at sea has been impressive, but this should not obscure the fact that Russia’s global power projection capabilities are undiminished.
The Russian surface fleet, often mocked as aged and underperforming, is in fact still capable of sustained global operations. Moscow considers its navy to be a global force; that thinking shows no signs of shifting. At the start of the full-scale war against Ukraine in 2022, the RFN had 19 warships, from four different fleets, in the Mediterranean. Since then, the Northern and Pacific fleets in particular have been busy conducting global deployments, exercises and presence operations. Many ships that patrolled the Mediterranean in 2021–22 have been deployed repeatedly in 2023–24. While the effect on these ships’ material condition is currently unknown, Russia’s navy has been using them extensively around the world. Their combat readiness is almost certainly diminished, but their ability to conduct presence operations is not.
Prospects for Russian naval development
Because of extremely long build times for naval vessels, the war has not yet had a noticeable structural effect on Russian naval shipbuilding. In 2023, deliveries to the RFN actually increased over the previous year, with highlights including the commissioning of Russia’s newest Borey-A ballistic missile submarine, a Yasen-M nuclear-powered multi-purpose submarine, a third Gorshkov-class frigate, and two Steregushchiy-class frigates. Further additions have included several smaller corvettes, a Kilo-class diesel submarine and fast-attack boats, all of which are suited for near-sea operations closer to Russian shores.
Nonetheless, Russian naval shipbuilding faces a complex future. Competition between the different armed services over spending may negatively affect plans for naval development as the army recapitalizes its forces and will probably drive hard choices over service prioritization. At the moment, Russia’s defence ministry is either ignoring those difficult trade-offs or believes it can overcome them with larger budgets.
Making matters worse, United Shipbuilding Company (USC), the state-owned umbrella enterprise for naval construction, has endured years of catastrophic losses. In 2023, President Vladimir Putin finally ordered that all of USC’s shares be put into trust management via a major national bank. Indeed, Moscow’s 2023 announcement of a significant boost in general military spending over the next several years may in fact be for the purpose of servicing the Russian defence industry’s massive debt rather than expanding its capacity. And given the long build times and enormous resource investment needed for capital ships, a short-term injection of funding is unlikely to make a significant difference in the number of major combatant vessels available to the RFN.
The effects of sanctions will likely become more noticeable in the near term as the shipbuilding industry continues to adjust to the loss of access to Western technologies. The industry is either attempting domestic development of technologies or seeking international replacements for everything from machine tools to ship engines, electronics and specialized ship lighting. Russia’s largest supplier, especially for machine tools and marine diesel engines, is China. But even if the Russian shipbuilding industry is able to procure the proper machine tools, it will be years before it can develop and produce properly machined parts at scale. Worse, Chinese diesel engines aboard Russian ships have proven to be unreliable. Finally, the Russian ship construction industry looks set to be caught between multiple constraints: a debt-ridden USC, the need for increased civilian and military ship construction at too few shipyards, a lack of shipyard capacity for new construction, and a shortage of trained shipyard employees.
Even if the Russian shipbuilding industry is able to procure the proper machine tools, it will be years before it can develop and produce properly machined parts at scale.
The navy leadership has made it clear that, within these constraints, it will continue to prioritize its nuclear-powered submarine fleet. At the end of 2023, the RFN’s then commander-in-chief, Nikolai Yevmenov, announced that ‘the High Command of the Russian Navy will continue to pay priority attention to the development of the nuclear submarine component of the Submarine Forces, which are the basis for guaranteed state security in maritime and ocean areas’.
Despite massive cost overruns and delayed completion, the Borey-A and Yasen-M programmes are extremely capable and satisfy Russia’s commitment to maintaining a seaborne nuclear and non-nuclear strategic deterrent. They will continue to represent the most significant undersea challenge that Russia poses to Western navies in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
The RFN also plans to maintain a busy surface ship production schedule through 2035. But it is in this area that the navy will probably face its most difficult choices over the next decade, as the bills for the war on Ukraine come due and as the effects of decades of inefficiency are felt financially. Shipyards across Russia have orders on their books for new frigates, corvettes, small missile and patrol ships, minesweepers and large amphibious ships. But the industry is struggling to deliver on these commitments.
The next decade of surface ship construction may be even worse than the two previous ones. Naval shipbuilders will have to navigate the aforementioned USC-related debt crisis while simultaneously managing the results of sanctions, fundamental structural neglect, a lack of parts and sub-assemblies, and continued high demand for new and modernized vessels.
Despite potential challenges with its future fleet, Moscow will likely continue to exploit overseas naval basing opportunities. While Russia reportedly has ‘indefinitely suspended’ its on-again, off-again plans for a naval base in Sudan, more promising from Moscow’s perspective is the prospect of a naval base in Tobruk, Libya. Such a base would strengthen Russia’s connections with emerging dictatorships in Libya and West Africa while providing for greater situational awareness of NATO naval forces in the Mediterranean. Tobruk has seen hundreds of tons of military equipment shipped from the Russian naval base at Tartus, Syria, which has proven to be of enormous strategic value to Russia since the Ukraine war began. Elsewhere, in the South Caucasus, the separatist government in Abkhazia has also reportedly agreed to begin working to host the Russian navy at Ochamchire. Looming economic challenges for the RFN are currently having a negligible effect on these plans.
Lessons and policy implications for NATO military planners
The naval dimensions to date of Russia’s war on Ukraine have important implications for NATO military planners and for others seeking to anticipate the trajectory of Russian naval force regeneration and to prepare accordingly. First of all, the conflict has validated important Russian assumptions about modern naval warfare. In 2017, Russia’s naval warfighting doctrine first recognized what it called ‘a qualitatively new objective: destruction of the enemy’s military and economic potential by striking its vital facilities from the sea’. First demonstrated in Syria and then to even more devastating effect against Ukraine, naval precision-strike capabilities have been at the centre of Russia’s strategic campaign in the current war. While Russia’s ability to fire large salvos of land attack cruise missiles is constrained by the small number of vertical-launch cells on each ship, the RFN’s ability to conduct precision land attack from the sea will continue to be an area of acute focus for Russian military planners in the future.
Beyond the obvious infrastructure challenges this presents to NATO nations, the conflict has proven that transatlantic force flows in wartime are at extreme risk when they arrive in port. Attacking moving objects over the horizon at sea is complex and difficult. Attacking fixed objects at a pier is comparatively less difficult. Russian ships in particular have suffered a string of catastrophic attacks while in port or dry dock, ironically underlining the point made in 2017 about the relative vulnerability of fixed objects. For NATO, in any conflict involving seaborne resupply, this means that ensuring rapid onload and offload capabilities at multiple, resilient ports will be crucial for mitigating Russian attacks.
The odd case of the Ukrainian LST Yuriy Olefirenko proves the point. Early in the war, this lumbering Cold War-era ship bombarded Russian positions in Kherson from within sight of the coastline, then escaped without facing any counterattack. Later, a Russian aerial drone located the vessel, but with neither ships nor aircraft available to attack it, the Russian military resorted to an artillery bombardment, from which the vessel escaped unscathed. A land attack cruise missile finally destroyed it in port a year later.
A possible explanation for this failure on Russia’s part is that for all of the analysis in the last decade about Russian advancements in long-range strike capabilities, technological modernization in this area has not been matched by development of concepts of employment and training for integrating the reconnaissance-strike complex against mobile targets. This is a crucial area for future research, but the probable lesson here is that any adversary with a mobile naval force capable of rapid, disaggregated, coordinated manoeuvre and strike operations would present Russia with significant challenges, at least in the short term.
Finally, Ukraine’s USV campaign is an unquestionable success that has rescued Kyiv’s previously perilous position at sea and turned the western Black Sea into a denied area for Russian ships. At the same time, this campaign’s outsized impact on public narratives about the war threatens to skew analysis in unhelpful ways for Western naval planners. The episodic nature of successful attacks begs the question of how high Ukraine’s true failure rate has been. Unfortunately, no such data is publicly available.
It would be unwise for Western military planners to dismiss the capabilities of the entire Russian navy just because of recent experience.
Ukraine appears to be innovating faster than Russia, but observers should be cautious about coming to any firm conclusions about USV warfare. Too little is known publicly about Russian adaptation in response to Ukrainian innovation in this case. Nonetheless, the war has made it clear that USVs will be a fixture of naval combat perhaps for decades to come. Understanding the personnel, logistics, concept development, command and control, training and countermeasures requirements must be a priority for navies in the future.
The Black Sea Fleet has undeniably been embarrassed by Ukraine. The RFN’s amphibious capability is shattered. The limitations of its much-vaunted long-range precision-strike regime are exposed. The effects of sanctions will almost certainly constrict an already inefficient and corrupt production pipeline even further. Russia’s navy faces a painful decade as it becomes further disconnected from Western supply chains, is more reliant on domestic production of tools and parts, and seeks improved partnership with China.
Yet despite these problems, it would be unwise for Western military planners to dismiss the capabilities of the entire Russian navy just because of recent experience. Russian warship construction has not met its goals for decades, and almost certainly will continue to suffer the same fate over the next 10 years. Nonetheless, Moscow’s intention to shift the focus of Russian trade to the Indo-Pacific will require Russia to maintain a global naval presence. The Russian leadership will thus expect the RFN to defend the nation’s strategic economic interests, which are increasingly found offshore in Arctic fossil fuel fields and along Indo-Pacific trade routes.
If Moscow wants to project power around the world, it will have to rely in large part on the RFN to do so. The path to success is not clear, but the Russian navy will almost certainly muddle through – much as it has done previously – with a patchwork of ad hoc bureaucratic measures, service life extensions and short-term repairs accompanying a trickle of new ships and submarines. Western planners would be wise to keep this in mind.
Note: The opinions here are the author’s alone and do not reflect those of the U.S. Navy, Department of Defense, or any other part of the U.S. Government.
