The Black Sea Fleet - From Regional Power to Constrained Force
Part One: The Fleet, the War, and the Attrition Campaign
Curated by Robin Ashby, Chair, Eurodefense EU-Russia Observatory
The Inheritance of Sevastopol
Russia's Black Sea Fleet entered the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 at the height of its post-Soviet capability. Sevastopol — seized, along with the rest of Crimea, in 2014 — had been transformed in eight years from a leased base operating on borrowed time into a heavily fortified naval complex. New submarines had been commissioned. New corvettes carrying Kalibr cruise missiles had replaced ageing Soviet hulls. Coastal defence batteries covered the approaches. The fleet's air component had been reinforced. By almost any measure, the Black Sea Fleet in early 2022 was the most capable it had been since the Soviet Union's dissolution.
It was also, as events proved, profoundly vulnerable to a form of warfare its commanders had not adequately anticipated.
