Vice Admiral Viktor Sokolov got kicked from his position of commander of the Black sea fleet. No kidding, Russian navy is such a continuous wreck show in Ukraine that some change need to be done, and maybe more than just switch the commander.
Sokolov is being scapegoated for failures which are not his fault. He had no proper ships, no funds to maintain those that he had, and no independence to plan fleet operations for the ships and funds at his disposal. Most likely he was directly ordered to ferry something with the ship that was just sunk by drones.
Kremlin always blames others for their mistakes. It is fundamental to the authoritarian nature of the Russian state and its persistent culture of instututional incompetency:
the tsar is blameless, the boyars are guilty. The wider culture of externalising blame and denial of responsibility is so endemic to Russian mentality because this is what the political hierarchy imposes on society through its actions.
This is the general reason for all the problems but the specifics are more complicated.
Russian navy is whatever remains in operation from the Soviet navy and a handful of new designs that are still constrained by Soviet doctrinal framework only with some improvements introduced to close most obvious capability gaps. Russian navy is therefore a 35 y.o. formation both in tactical and often technical sense. But since in 1991 the Soviet Navy lagged by approx. a decade behind USN in innovation it is a 45 y.o. navy.
Modern designs like 22350 or 20380 entering service in limited amounts are the focus of propaganda but the
core of fleet are still ships designed in the 1970s which is important because these ships were built for:
- strategic layout that no longer exists
- fleet and aviation support that no longer exists
- tactics that no longer are applicable
I overlaid shorelines from 1984 onto 2014, coloured for WarPact, NATO and neutral, to demonstrate how radically the situation changed for a Soviet fleet which was very much like PLAN in the past - differently structured, dependent on shore-based aviation and primarily tasked with protecting the "maritime flank".
During the Cold War BSF was tasked not with power projection in the Black Sea but with power projection in the Mediterranean Sea. And since Med was dominated by NATO navies it was a
disruptive force meant to absorb enemy assets. It was also primarily tasked with ASW not land attack or air defense because at the time AShMs were not very effective. USN area defenses were developed to protect CBGs against Soviet missile attacks conducted primarily by Naval Aviation and then by submarines. For Black Sea the fleet had multiple light ASW frigates and for the Med it had large ASW ships (cruisers and destroyers in NATO classification). The strategic profile of BSF was to hunt submarines and absorb stronger enemy navy and the ships reflected that. Many of those ships are still in service and the entire fleet composition remains defined by that old doctrine even if modern warships are designed differently.
Fundamentally the largest (and unsinkable) warship for Russia is Crimea. It allows Russia to apply its advantages as land power - GBAD and land-based aviation. This is a short overview of its potential:
I do not know how long the deliveries are estimated, but if they are in the short term, it would be the entry of NATO using the conflict with Ukraine I guess Russia will announce a new phase of its operation It doesn't matter if the US sends 2,000 M1A2 tanks to the Kiev regime. Without...
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All the other BSF ships complement Crimea. Because of that there is no need for fleet with equivalent capabilities. BSF is not designed to fight in disadvantageous conditions so it can't do it reliably even in its own waters. People who point to technological advances like Starlink miss the point. Starlink doesn't make it
possible for Ukraine to attack Russian navy. It only makes it
cheap and
convenient.
The only reason why there is some Black Sea Fleet left is because Ukraine was even weaker. Any competent adversary would have sunk the fleet long ago. But it also wouldn't be much of a priority because the BSF is not a determining factor in the war or
even in the battle for the Black Sea.
Since the war started the Turkish straits have been closed to all warships. These are the BSF vessels currently (as of 10 Feb 24) locked out of their nominal AoO.
Merkuriy is the newly (2023) commissioned 20381 corvette.
Russia is therefore left with
two Grigorovich (11356) FFGs as the only capable, general purpose warships at the inception of hostilities.
Moskva served only as a command ship because due to lack of funds for modernisation and proper maintenance it was not at full capability to provide the area defense with S-300F and defend itself at the same time.
On Moskva:
This is why Surface scan radars are mostly in X or C band. as those bands have propagation advantages. It may still lost low altitude contact but can quickly regain it. Something of lower frequencies like S or L doesn't have. They're more suited for high-medium altitude area defense. Let's take...
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All the other ships are ASW with Osa-M or auxiliary or missile boats which struggle to stay at sea during higher sea states and can only serve as mobile missile launchers. The threat of being hit by a Grad/Uragan salvo is also very real so the ships can't do much to support the fighting on land. Their firepower is also not sufficient to provide any meaningful support. An outdated gun cruiser with 8x 155mm like BAP Almirante Grau would be genuinely useful let alone 9x 406mm of USS Iowa.
All of this fundamentally also points to the core issue with Russia's culture of incompetence and grandiose delusion. Just like I always point to lack of prepared defenses in the south, especially a defensive line on the western bank of Dnipro and a fortification system in Vasilivka-Tokmak-Melitopol region as main argument for Ukraine's incompetence and responsibility for how the war went, I point to Russia's lack of aerial-amphibious operations in Dniester estuary and Budjak as sufficient proof of the same.
From early 2022:
I'm asking people to make solid predictions just for this next week. Not long term. Let's see how accurate people are. I don't know is a perfectly acceptable answer. My prediction from last year is about a mil attack against Ukraine from Russia to happen in 2022 My prediction from some days...
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Their sorties have been overwhelmingly ineffective. I say this with a fair deal of knowledge on VKS employment during the conflict. They've performed adequately in a counter-air capacity, and their use of AEA has been broadly competent, but they have utterly failed to conduct an impactful...
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Russia was simply incapable of both amassing its amphibious fleet and innovating to use low-cost solutions to build the necessary expeditionary basing potential. The fact that Syrian intervention would provide sufficient rationale for that is further proof for Russia incompetence.
This is Shahid Mahdavi, the second (after Shahid Roudaki) and larger of IRGC expeditionary base ships:
This is Russia's amphibious fleet:
| ship | displacement | cargo | Black Sea | Caspian | Baltic | Northern | Pacific | total w/o PF |
| 11711 Gren | 6000t | 1500t | | | | 2 | | 2 |
| 1171 Tapir | 4950t | 1000t | 2 | | | | 1 | 2 |
| 775 Ropucha | 4000t | 500t | 4 | | 4 | 4 | 3 | 12 |
| 21820 Dyugon | 280t | 140t | | 1 | 3 | | 1 | 4 |
| 11770 Serna | 100t | 50t | 2 | 4 | 3 | | 1 | 8 |
| 1176 Akula | 120t | 50t | 1 | 1 | 3 | 4 | 3 | 9 |
| 12322 Pomornik | 550t | 150t | | | 2 | | | 2 |
W/o PF the combined capacity is
~12 700t of cargo. That's 250 tanks.
Add improvised landing decks for helo ship-hopping and 2-3 adapted "expeditionary base" vessels and the entire southern coast would have been under control within 1-2 weeks with a well planned operation and the battle for the Black Sea would be over and with direct link to Transnistria Ukrainian rear and LoC would be threateed.
