The deployment of the Russian navy landing ship Olenegorsky Gornyak into the Black Sea in February 2022 was one of the signals that Russia was about to make good on its threats to widen its war on Ukraine.
Eighteen months later on Thursday night or Friday morning, explosives-laden Ukrainian drone boats speeded into Novorossiysk, a port in southern Russia just 70 miles east of Russian-occupied Crimea, and struck Olenegorsky Gornyak.
The 370-foot Ropucha-class landing ship, one of 11 landing ships that sailed with the Russian Black Sea Fleet on the first day of the wider war, survived a direct hit from at least one of the Ukrainian navy and security directorate’s custom-made, 16-foot drone boats. But only barely.
The drone’s video feed, posted online by the Ukrainian government, depicts the 2,200-pound, gasoline-powered unmanned surface vehicle—which operators apparently control via Starlink satellite—closing in on Olenegorsky Gornyak while under the cover of darkness.
Videos that circulated on social media on Friday morning confirmed the damage to the amphibious vessel: she’s depicted under tow and listing 10 or 20 degrees to port—clear evidence of extensive internal flooding. Any landing ship mostly is empty space: it has to be in order to accommodate troops and vehicles. It takes a lot of water to flood that space and induce a noticeable list.
By late Friday morning, a tugboat had nudged Olenegorsky Gornyak to a pier in Novorossiysk, essentially leaning the landing ship against the steel and concrete so she doesn’t sink. Olenegorsky Gornyak will require extensive repairs; in effect, her war is over.
Olenegorsky Gornyak’s loss brings to four the number of major Black Sea Fleet warships the Ukrainian navy has put out of action: the landing ship Saratov, blasted by a ballistic missile in March 2022; the cruiser Moskva, holed by an anti-ship missile the following month; the rescue ship Vasily Bekh, another victim of an anti-ship missile; and now Olenegorsky Gornyak.
The Ukrainians also sank or badly damaged several Russian patrol boats and landing craft. The sinkings are a remarkable feat for a fleet that, after scuttling its sole frigate in the early hours of the Russian invasion in February 2022, apparently has just one large ship left: an aging landing ship that has been hiding out near the mouth of the Dnipro River and occasionally lobbing short-range rockets at Russian forces.
The Ukrainian navy now effectively is a shipless navy, but no less dangerous for its lack of large hulls. Between its locally-made Neptune anti-ship missiles and Western-made Harpoon ASMs, as well as its missile-armed TB-2 drones and one-way drone boats, the Ukrainian navy isn’t just holding the Russian Black Sea Fleet at bay, it actively is beating back the fleet’s 30 surviving large ships.
Russian warships staging from Crimea are under constant drone assault; now ships in Russia proper are at risk, too. When Russian warships leave port, they do so briefly—usually only long enough to launch a few cruise missiles at Ukrainian cities.
The Kremlin last month canceled the 11-month-old Black Sea Grain Initiative, which had allowed commercial vessels to ship grain from Ukrainian ports. The Russians subsequently signaled they might blockade grain shipments; they even sailed the corvette Sergey Kotov toward the western Black Sea.
That blockade turned out to be a bluff. Grain ships are still sailing from Ukraine’s ports on the Danube River Delta. Last night’s drone attack on Olenegorsky Gornyak is a reminder of why the grain ships can sail with impunity: the Russian fleet is losing the Black Sea naval war. And it’s losing it to a navy with practically no big ships of its own.
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