- Ukraine said on Tuesday it had sunk another Russian warship using a sea drone.
- Russian milbloggers are furious about what they say are mistakes by commanders.
- Ukraine has achieved a series of astonishing victories over Russia in the Black Sea.
Russian milbloggers appear to be blaming inept commanders for the sinking of a $65 million Russian warship.
Ukrainian military intelligence said on Tuesday that it had scored another success in its campaign against Russia’s much bigger Russian Black Sea fleet.
The Main Directorate of Intelligence of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine said the Russian vessel, the Sergei Kotov, was destroyed by a sea drone that struck it in the Kerch Strait.
The Institute for the Study of War, a US think tank, said Russian military bloggers, who are often ultranationalists with close military links, are “decrying the Russian military command’s lack of response to the incident and mounting a wider critique against the bureaucratic inertia of the Russian military apparatus.”
The ISW said that one prominent military blogger on Telegram, Rybar, complained that the Segei Kotov, had not been properly fitted to defend itself, despite having been targeted by sea drones before.
Another Telegram blogger, Dva Maiyora, said that Russian commanders are extremely unlikely to listen to crew and defend vessels better because of “the command’s larger cultural proclivity to cover up mistakes instead of addressing them,” the ISW said.
Military blogger Two majors said that commanders often try to place the blame elsewhere to cover up their mistakes.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been beset since its earliest days by issues with poor commanders, military corruption, and an excessively centralized military system that discourages personnel from reporting problems.
The “unwillingness to decentralize decision making authority and a failure to communicate accurate information” are some of its core failings, according to a 2023 report by the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
Ukraine has used ingenuity and improvisation to offset its disadvantages in the Black Sea, which Russia’s navy has historically dominated.
It has used sea drones and long-range missile attacks to force Russian vessels to withdraw from Sevastopol in occupied Crimea late last year. Ukraine claims to have damaged a third of Russia’s fleet since the war began, destroying 25 vessels and disabling 15.
But on the ground, Ukraine is struggling. Its forces are facing serious ammunition shortages as Republicans in Congress block $60 billion in aid. Russia is seeking to take advantage of the situation by intensifying its attacks.
