Summary and Key Points: The April 2022 sinking of Russia’s flagship Moskva by Ukraine’s Neptune missile marked the beginning of the end for the Russian Black Sea Fleet.
-Originally designed only for defensive operations against NATO, the fleet was unprepared for Ukraine’s missile and drone attacks.
-The Moskva itself was poorly engineered, featuring heavy missiles mounted dangerously high, compromising its stability and survivability.
-Subsequent Ukrainian strikes using advanced Western weaponry forced a mass retreat from Crimea, and today the fleet is largely inactive, unable to counter modern threats.
-Without drastic changes, the Black Sea Fleet faces continued decline, signaling a major strategic defeat for Russia.
Why Russia’s Black Sea Fleet Collapsed After Losing Its Flagship
The April 13, 2022 sinking of the Moskva guided-missile cruiser, which was the flagship of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, was the beginning of the end for that fleet.
The loss of the ship, which was destroyed by a Ukraine-designed Neptune antiship missile, highlighted the many shortcomings of the Black Sea Fleet—pitfalls that have led to its almost total dissolution over the course of the war.
There are multiple causes for the collapse of this Russian force, some of which were decades in the making. One is that the Black Sea Fleet was always intended to be a defensive formation that could fight off an attempt by NATO nations to attack the coastline of the then-Soviet Union.
It was never designed to protect the peninsula from attack by Ukraine or to be used to attack targets in Ukraine, which is what it has been pressed into service to do since February 2022.
Another weak point of the fleet is that the Soviet Union was not a naval power in the class of the U.S. Navy, or of the World War II-era Royal Navy. The USSR did not see its navy playing the role of the blue-water fleet of a major power, and it was inclined to make certain compromises that left ship designs unsuited for the missions similar ships would have played in other navies.
Ship Design Defects
The Moskva was commissioned into the Soviet Navy back in 1982, as a Chinese assessment of the sinking of the vessel observes. The ship suffered serious defects from the beginning, as an article in a popular Chinese military journal, Shipborne Weapons, described, and it was not a truly modern surface combatant.
The same article references a report from the 701 Institute that criticized the Russian ship design for having poorly integrated weaponry that could not perform effectively. The same report highlighted that the vessel was truly from a previous era and pointed out the unusual characteristics of this cruiser class.
Foremost among the problematic traits is the ship’s heavy armament: The large Vulkan P-1000 (SS-N-12) antiship missiles are mounted in bulky canisters on the main deck. This is an unstable, top-heavy design that always threatened to be fatal if the ship were hit in battle, according to the Chinese article. This turned out to be the case, as was seen in the aftermath of the attack on the ship.
Fleet Misfortune
Since those ill-fated early days of the war, as a 2024 Atlantic Council paper points out, “Russia’s once-vaunted Black Sea Fleet has been decimated by Ukrainian drones and missiles in what must rank as the most remarkable series of naval defeats in modern military history.
“Despite barely having a navy of its own, Ukraine has managed to sink or severely damage approximately one-third of Putin’s fleet, forcing the bulk of his remaining warships to retreat from occupied Crimea. The war at sea has gone so badly for Russia that by spring 2024, Britain’s Ministry of Defense was already declaring the Black Sea Fleet ‘functionally inactive.’”
As the war progressed, the Black Sea fleet was forced to gradually retreat from its bases on the Crimean peninsula and redeploy to other major regional ports, such as Novorossiysky. Indeed, by the end of 2024, the majority of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet had also departed from Novorossiysk, where it had been concentrated for months.
An abrupt second retreat from Crimea has sparked widespread speculation. No official explanation for the move has been provided by Russian authorities.
Those watching the war closely point to a recent series of Ukrainian strikes using advanced European weaponry, including Storm Shadow air-launched cruise missiles, and U.S.-supplied ATACMS precision-guided ballistic missiles, as the cause. These weapons have shown themselves capable of evading Russian air defenses, and as such they are a potent threat to Russia’s few remaining high-value naval assets.
If Ukraine continues to expand the range and spectrum of its missile and drone arsenals, the fleet will have little left that it can use to defend against Ukraine’s attacks. More likely than not, the world has seen the last of this Russian naval force as we once knew it.
About the Author: Reuben F. Johnson
Reuben F. Johnson is a survivor of the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and is now an Expert on Foreign Military Affairs with the Fundacja im. Kazimierza Pułaskiego in Warsaw. He has been a consultant to the Pentagon, several NATO governments and the Australian government in the fields of defense technology and weapon systems design. Over the past 30 years he has resided in and reported from Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Brazil, the People’s Republic of China and Australia.
