Footage of the nighttime attack showed drones racing toward the vessel and then a massive plume of smoke rising from the ship.
Russia’s Ministry of Defence has not commented on the claimed attack and did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
If confirmed, it would mark strike twenty-five in a remarkable kill streak that Ukraine told CNN represents the disabling of a full third of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet.
This is all the more impressive given Ukraine’s navy all but ceased to exist after Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea.
At the outbreak of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, Ukraine scuttled its remaining flagship, the Hetman Sahaidachny, to prevent it from falling into enemy hands.
Yet Ukraine has struck repeatedly at Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, as well as at the heart of its historic naval power in those waters, the occupied port of Sevastopol in Crimea.
Ukraine’s most astonishing triumph came early, in April 2022, when it sank Russia’s Black Sea flagship, the Moskva.
Last June, attacks on Sevastopol also forced the cancellation of Navy Day celebrations, while in September Ukraine seriously damaged a submarine, the Rostov-on-Don, and a landing ship, the Minsk.
Military analysts say that Ukraine has been able to offset some of Russia’s naval might through innovation and daring.
Without warships of its own, it’s leaned on two means: cruise missiles and naval drones.
Ukraine’s experimentation with sea drones — packed with explosives and remotely guided to their targets — make it the first nation in history to deploy them effectively in naval warfare.
Drones are relatively cheap and are uncrewed, so while they often fail, those that get through can be used to inflict huge damage at minimal cost.
The corvette Ivanovets, which was reportedly sunk last month, cost Russia about $70 million.
This gives Ukraine an “immense asymmetric advantage,” Basil Germond, an expert in international security at Lancaster University in the UK, told Business Insider.
The reach of drones also exceeds that of cruise missiles, and Ukraine is rapidly coming up with improvements, such as equipping them with missile launchers.
While cruise missiles such as the UK- and France-supplied Storm Shadow and the Harpoon, have been pounding vessels, they can only be fired from up to 190 miles away, and contrary to naval drones they’re very expensive so need to be rationed.
Still, Storm Shadows were used last September in the only successful attack on a Russian submarine to date during the war, and the first attack to disable a Russian submarine since World War 2.
“Ukraine has been extremely successful against the Black Sea Fleet, forcing Russia to relocate assets further away from Ukraine and the frontline,” Germond told BI. “This is operationally significant, but also symbolically.”
Down, but not out
Is Ukraine’s Black Sea success a solution to Ukraine’s stalled ground offensive?
“No, it isn’t,” Michael Kofman, an analyst at The Carnegie Endowment, told the “War on the Rocks” podcast in January. But, he added, “it’s a very big bright spot in the story for last year, which otherwise has sort of been a year of missed opportunities.”
While Ukraine will be unable to secure victory over Russia through audacious naval operations alone, the attacks play their part in keeping up the pressure, in various ways, according to experts.
Increasingly, they’ve meant that Russia had to redistribute some of its fleet from Sevastopol to less well-equipped ports such as Feodosia, in eastern Crimea, and Novorossiysk, on the Russian coast.
That in itself has not been a major blow. The UK’s Ministry of Defence said earlier this month that Russia is “almost certainly still able to conduct its three main tasks in the Black Sea: long-range strike, patrol and support.”
Sidharth Kaushal, a naval expert at the UK’s Royal United Services Institute, told BI that Russia could also reseed minefields using airdrops, and can support cruise missile campaigns from very long distances.
But it’s struggling to continue its “economic strangulation” of Ukraine by blockading the flow of exports from Odesa, he said.
In fact, such is Ukraine’s confidence in the area that it secured workable shipping insurance deals last year, causing a minor boom in exports in December.
It remains to be seen if this trend will continue, but “that would seem to me to be a very positive statistic,” Kaushal said.
Germond put it more bluntly: “A Russian blockade of Ukraine is not credible anymore.”
Ukrainian triumphs boost morale
Another practical issue is simply one of wear and tear. Russia can’t easily replenish its Black Sea fleet using vessels from other waters due to the Montreux Convention, an 87-year-old treaty that limits what Russia and NATO can send into the sea.
This means that any ships sunk result in a longer-term decrease in the Black Sea Fleet.
“We often forget that warships are the most expensive military assets in a country’s arsenal,” Germond told BI.
Another crucial effect is also on morale with ground troops, Germond said.
After the sinking of the Ivanovets, Ukraine’s Ministry of Defence posted a short video of a Ukrainian soldier doing a dance in apparent reaction to the news.
The morale impact has also reached the Kremlin, Germond said.
The attacks on Crimea and the Black Sea Fleet “contradict Putin’s narrative that all is being normal for the population in Russia and Crimea,” he said.
