Name: How the Russian Navy Lost to a Country Without Any Boats
Uploaded: 2026-03-27T17:00:12.000Z
Duration: 40 min 24 s
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There's something fascinating happening in the Black Sea right now that could change the future of warfare in the 21st century forever.

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine began more than two years ago, the war on the land has extended into a war at sea as well, and

Adverbs of degree

the Russian Navy has not been having a very good time.

The Ukrainians have managed to sink ship after ship after ship in the Black Sea to the point where, two years into this war, the entire Russian Black Sea fleet that operates in the region has collectively lost around a third of all its vessels and 40% of all its tonnage to the bottom of the sea.

And faced with such catastrophic losses largely inflicted in the seas around Crimea, the Ukrainians have forced the majority of the remaining Russian ships in the Black Sea to retreat from their centuries-old headquarters at Sevastopol in Crimea towards a new operating headquarters on the Black Sea's eastern rim at Novorossiysk, hundreds of kilometers away from the military front lines around Crimea.

The Ukrainians have shattered the Russian naval blockade on their coastline so thoroughly by this point that the country is now, as of 2024, exporting even more goods to the global market than it was before the invasion even began.

And what's most impressive about all of this is that Ukraine has managed to effectively checkmate the Russian Navy in the Black Sea without even having a navy of their own, and

Ukraine has pulled off what appears to be nothing less than a naval miracle, and

how they've managed to do it will be studied at naval war colleges for generations to come.

And there are some analysts who have even begun to suggest that Ukraine's unprecedented destruction of the Russian Black Sea fleet has shown that big, expensive surface warships like cruisers, destroyers, and

even aircraft carriers could be obsolete weapons of war in the high-tech world of the 21st century.

This is how Ukraine, a nation without a navy, managed to effectively destroy an enemy navy that was, on paper, vastly more powerful and capable, and

First of all, it's important for you to understand Russia's inherent geographic disadvantages when it comes to its ability to wage naval warfare.

Throughout Russian history, Russian naval planners have had to contend with the fact that their coastlines on the Arctic, the Pacific, the Baltic Sea, and

the Black Sea are all separated from each other by hundreds or even thousands of kilometers.

It is very geographically difficult to transport warships between the Black Sea, the Baltic Sea, the Arctic Ocean, or the Pacific Ocean, and

in some cases it takes literally months' worth of travel to accomplish, and

the ships have to pass through multiple potentially dangerous narrow choke points all along the way.

Because of this, Russia has never been able to effectively concentrate its naval forces in a single theater the same way that the British, the Japanese, or the Americans have been able to do, and

so Russian naval strategy has always had to contend with this so-called four seas problem for centuries.

Rather than having a single large operating navy, Russia has been geographically forced to divide its naval forces and operate four separate, smaller, largely independent regional navies in the Arctic, the Pacific, the Baltic, and

the Black Sea instead, which has always made the Russian Navy more vulnerable to getting overwhelmed by foreign powers who can more easily concentrate their naval forces into a single location.

The most classic example of this was during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 to 1905.

The Japanese began the war by concentrating all of their naval forces in the Pacific and launching a surprise attack against the numerically inferior Russian Pacific Fleet that, at the time, was headquartered in Port Arthur in modern-day China.

Then the Russians responded to the attack by assembling additional warships that were all the way over on the other side of Eurasia, in the Baltic and Black Seas, and

over a period of 18 months painstakingly transported them all the way around the world on a journey of 18,000 kilometers to rendezvous in the South China Sea and attack the Japanese Navy in the Pacific.

And once they finally got there, the new Russian fleet in the Pacific was exhausted, and

it was promptly engaged by the combined Japanese fleet.

The new Russian fleet in the Pacific was then almost completely destroyed down to the very last ship in the process, in one of the most catastrophic naval defeats ever suffered in human history, that also offered a prelude to what is currently going on in the Black Sea between Russia and Ukraine today.

The modern Russian Black Sea Fleet was founded in 1783 almost immediately after the Crimean Peninsula, was first conquered by the Russian Empire from the Ottomans.

For more than 240 years since then, the Russian and Soviet Black Sea Fleets have always been headquartered in the port of Sevastopol because it is the most strategically significant natural harbor that can be found anywhere in the entire Black Sea.

It's a warm water port year-round that doesn't freeze over during the winter, meaning that it can be accessed by ships without needing icebreakers year-round, and

it's also a deep water port, which means that its waters are deep enough to house larger displacement warships and submarines.

It's a large and well-protected natural harbor that cuts into the Crimean landmass that can accommodate a very large number of ships and submarines, and

it sits in a highly strategic commanding location at Crimea's southern tip almost precisely in the geographic center of the Black Sea, enabling warships and submarines based inside to rapidly sortie out and access any threats across the region.

Because of these natural advantages, whoever has been able to control Sevastopol has been able to effectively dominate the entire Black Sea region for centuries, and

these natural advantages have been compounded by the fact that over the centuries that the Black Sea Fleet has been based there, Sevastopol has more critical naval infrastructure and repair and support facilities than anywhere else in the Black Sea too, which cements its location as the most ideal place in the region to keep a navy at.

But the Black Sea Fleet's very existence and centuries-long presence in Sevastopol first came into open question a little more than 30 years ago in 1991, after the Soviet Union collapsed and dissolved.

Crimea and Sevastopol each found themselves as a part of the newly independent Ukraine, and

by extension so did virtually the entire Soviet Black Sea Fleet that found itself headquartered there.

There were significant arguments and disagreements on the fate of the hundreds of ships in the Black Sea after the Soviet Union dissolved, with both Russia and Ukraine claiming to be the fleet's legal inheritors.

In 1995, Russian President Boris Yeltsin and Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma agreed on a temporary interim solution that placed the entire Black Sea Fleet under a joint Russian-Ukrainian command, still based out of Sevastopol, until a more long-term solution could be agreed upon.

That more long-term solution came two years later in 1997 with the Black Sea Fleet Partition Treaty, which divided the old Soviet Black Sea Fleet's assets 82% to Russia and 18% to Ukraine, while Russia retained the right to lease naval facilities in the port of Sevastopol from Ukraine for an annual fee of $97 million for a period of 20 years until 2017.

From then on, the separate Russian Black Sea Fleet and the Ukrainian Navy remained jointly headquartered in Sevastopol as they had been for centuries, but

In 2009, the then pro-Western and pro-EU President of Ukraine, Viktor Yushchenko, announced that he would not extend the Russian Black Sea Fleet's lease to Sevastopol after it expired in 2017, stating that the Russian Black Sea Fleet would have to move elsewhere outside of Ukraine by that point, likely to Russia's other port further to the east at Novorossiysk.

But while Novorossiysk is a large natural harbor, it's not as large or as well protected as the harbor at Sevastopol is.

It also has a major civilian merchant marine port that competes in the harbor for the smaller amount of available space that's absent in Sevastopol.

It lacks the commanding position in the center of the Black Sea that Sevastopol occupies, and

it lacks the same kind of expensive naval infrastructure and facilities that have been built up in Sevastopol over decades, which all makes Novorossiysk just a much less attractive port to headquarter a fleet at than Sevastopol.

So the Russians didn't really want to leave Sevastopol, and

so then, after the more pro-Russian Viktor Yanukovych became Ukraine's next president in 2010, the Russians wasted no time at all in negotiating with him to secure their access to Sevastopol for the foreseeable future.

Less than two months after assuming the Ukrainian presidency in April of 2010, Yanukovych renegotiated the terms of Russia's lease to their naval facilities at Sevastopol, dubbed the Kharkiv Pact.

The new terms extended the Russian Navy's lease at Sevastopol for decades until 2042, with an additional option baked in to extend the lease for another five years longer until 2047, with considerations for even further renewals after that.

At the time, the Russian Black Sea Fleet's continued presence in Sevastopol seemed to be legally secured for all of the foreseeable future, but

in less than four years after the Kharkiv Pact was signed in 2010, it would all be thrown into chaos.

In November of 2013, protests began in Ukraine against Yanukovych's pro-Russian foreign policy that eventually culminated into a full-blown revolution by February of 2014 that ousted Yanukovych from power and sent him into exile in Russia.

Then, worried that the new incoming Ukrainian government that took over afterwards would revoke the terms of the Kharkiv Pact and return to the previous Yushchenko-era policy of expelling the Black Sea Fleet from Sevastopol, the Russians quickly decided to invade Crimea with special forces and occupied it before unilaterally declaring to annex it the following month.

Russia's rapid takeover of Crimea and Sevastopol back then suddenly put the majority of the Ukrainian Navy that was inherited from the Soviet Black Sea Fleet and that was also headquartered in Sevastopol under Russian control.

About 5,000 of the Ukrainian Navy sailors either defected and joined with Russia, fled, or were captured, and

the vast majority of Ukraine's naval assets were captured and seized intact, which combined cut the Ukrainian Navy's size down by about two-thirds virtually overnight.

The only warships that Ukraine had left over after the Russian seizure of Sevastopol were four small corvettes and one frigate that became their flagship, the Hetman Sakhaydachny, along with a few smaller patrol boats, and

they were all forced to relocate their operating headquarters away from Sevastopol further west to Odessa.

And then in the years that followed after Russia's takeover of Crimea in 2014, Ukraine continued suffering even further naval setbacks too, especially in the Sea of Azov region.

Two years after their Crimea takeover in February of 2016, the Russians began building out their Crimean Bridge to link the Russian mainland with Crimea across the narrow Kerch Strait, the only maritime passing between the Sea of Azov and the Greater Black Sea.

When the bridge was finished two years later in 2018, it became the longest bridge in Europe, and

Russia was able to use the bridge and some of their own warships to effectively enforce a light blockade of the Ukrainian Azov ports like Berdyansk and Mariupol.

Shortly after the bridge's completion in 2018, the Russians temporarily blocked all Ukrainian merchant vessels from traveling through the Kerch Strait, and

they even seized three of Ukraine's small number of remaining naval vessels.

And even though the Russians didn't end up enforcing the blockade for long and even returned the ships they seized back to Ukraine, the incident still highlighted how weak and vulnerable the Ukrainian Navy had truly become by that point.

Then, in the buildup toward Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine that began in February of 2022, the Russians relocated six of their warships from elsewhere in January, the month before they invaded, to reinforce the Black Sea Fleet further because they knew that after they started the invasion, they probably wouldn't be able to send any additional warships into the Black Sea to replace any losses they might end up suffering, and

this is because of the intricacies of a nearly century-old international treaty known as the Montreux Convention.

Signed all the way back in 1936, Montreux has remained in force ever since, and

it regulates all maritime passage through the strategically important Turkish Straits, the Bosphorus in the northeast, and

the Dardanelles to the southwest, which together form the only navigable passageway between the Black Sea and the Aegean Sea, and

from there the Mediterranean and the Greater World Ocean.

The Straits are the only possible way that vessels from Georgia, Ukraine, Romania, and

Bulgaria can access the global ocean, and

the only way that Russia's regional vessels in the Black Sea can access the global ocean too.

Under the terms of Montreux, civilian merchant vessels of any flag are granted unrestricted access through the Turkish Straits whenever they want as if they're international waters, but

warships have much heavier restrictions placed on them.

During peacetime, nations that don't have a coast on the Black Sea have restricted access on sending warships through the Straits, limited both by tonnage and by the amount of time that they can actually stay in the Black Sea, which has always restricted navies from the U.S., U.K., or France from being able to access the sea.

The nations around the Black Sea, including Russia, enjoy fairly free and open access for their warships to use the Straits during peacetime, and

only the Black Sea nations themselves are ever allowed to send submarines through the Straits, while aircraft carriers are always banned regardless of what nation they belong to.

And most importantly, the terms of Montreux grant Turkey, who controls the Straits, the legal right to heavily restrict the passage of warships through the Straits during a time of war.

When any of the Black Sea nations are at war, Turkey reserves the right to close the Straits off to any of the warships of the nations at war, and

so within days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 beginning, Turkey exercised this right to block off any additional Russian warships from the Baltic, Arctic, or Pacific Fleets from being able to get into the Black Sea and replace any of their losses, which has meant that ever since the war began, Russia has not been able to replace any of their lost ships in the Black Sea from anywhere else, so whatever they started with there is whatever they'll have to fight and finish the entire war with.

Regardless, there were very few people who initially thought that Russia would suffer any devastating losses in the Black Sea when the invasion began, and

the general consensus among analysts at the time was that the vastly larger and more powerful Russian Black Sea Fleet, recently reinforced by a few more ships from elsewhere, would easily overwhelm the much smaller Ukrainian Navy and put the whole country under a withering blockade.

The Russian Black Sea Fleet began the war with the battlecruiser Moskva, the flagship, five frigates, 13 heavy-duty tank landing ships, six modern attack submarines, and

dozens of smaller vessels and patrol boats.

In total, the fleet had at its disposal around 74 surface warships and six submarines, compared to the paltry Ukrainian fleet of one frigate and four smaller corvettes.

Within just the first two weeks of the invasion beginning, the naval war already wasn't looking very good from Kyiv's perspective.

Nearly all of Ukraine's smaller naval vessels were damaged or outright sunk by Russian missiles, while the Ukrainian Navy's flagship, the frigate Hetman Sakhaydachny, was deliberately scuttled and destroyed by the Ukrainians themselves while it was in port in Mykolaiv to prevent it from getting potentially captured by the Russians and used against them, as at the time, the Russian army had advanced far enough to be on the city's outskirts and they were threatening to capture it.

Moreover, the fear of the Russian Navy orchestrating an amphibious landing near Ukraine's most major port remaining, Odessa, was so great in the early weeks of the invasion that the Ukrainians were forced to reinforce the area around the coast with an additional 5,000 troops and 100 tanks that were pulled from the battles that were raging around Ukraine's capital and two largest cities, Kyiv and Kharkiv.

The Russian Navy captured Ukraine's Snake Island early on into the invasion that strategically sits nearby to major Ukrainian trade routes from Odessa toward the Turkish Straits and the global ocean, while the Russian army captured all of the remaining Ukrainian coastline on the Sea of Azov, including the ports of Berdyansk and Mariupol.

That enabled the Russian Black Sea Fleet to begin enforcing a near-total maritime blockade of Ukraine's remaining coastline and ports in the west, choking off Ukraine's ability to export or import just about anything by sea.

And notably, the Russian blockade choked off Ukraine's ability to export any of their grains or agricultural products by sea, which usually represents more than 40% of Ukraine's export income and around 14% of all Ukrainian jobs.