Sea drones are increasingly used against the powerful Russian Black Sea fleet. The BBC quotes Katarzyna Zyst, a lecturer at the Norwegian Institute of Defense Studies, who is convinced of the value of the drones: according to her, the naval drones have prevented the Russian navy from gaining total control of the Black Sea, and are thus more or less become more the replacement for the navy that Ukraine does not have.
Sea drones have been around for a long time. They were already used in the First World War and have not changed substantially since then. The boats are small, no bigger than a kayak, and packed with explosives. The current batch only has advanced remote control. Short-range naval drones can be controlled remotely from a laptop. In longer-range drones, the route and target are programmed in advance.
Drones usually have a camera on board that sends images to the controller. These kinds of images often turn up online later on. That also happened last weekend: a video showed how the drone descended on the Olenegorsky Gornyak, a fifty-year-old Russian landing ship. The image disappeared at the moment of impact. Ukraine announced that the drone had flown into the air with 450 kilos of TNT. Video footage later appeared on social media of a heavily heeling Olenegorsky Gornyak being taken away by a tugboat.
Flying drones
The naval drones never really played a significant role in Ukraine before the war. Flying drones do. Since the Russian invasion in February 2022, they have quickly become leading in this battle as well. Russia and Ukraine are bombarding each other with highly explosive flying drones. On the battlefield, drones drop small grenades or designate targets for artillery fire.
Sea drones, however, are achieving more and more spectacular successes. They don’t fly, they sail, and they too explode when they hit their target. Sea drones were first mentioned after an attack on the Russian-occupied naval port of Sevastopol in Crimea in October 2022. That attack, by a combined group of flying and sailing drones, came as a nasty surprise to the Russians. Three Russian naval ships were severely damaged (Russia denied this, but reports of this were soon verified).
Russia’s Black Sea Fleet has since been forced to stay out of reach of Ukrainian drones as much as possible. Part of the fleet has moved from Sevastopol to the port of Novorossiysk in Russia. On Friday, it also turned out not to be safe for sea drones.
Drones are increasingly crossing the border. They have hit Moscow several times, and now Novorossieysk as well. Other affected places include Sevastopol in Crimea and the Kerch Bridge connecting Russia to Crimea. Of those, Ukraine says it has every right to attack them because Crimea is Ukrainian territory, and because the bridge crosses Ukrainian waters.
Ukraine builds many sea drones itself, it says, but foreign countries also make them and deliver them to Kiev. After the attack on Sevastopol in 2022, Germany announced that it had already donated two German naval drones to Ukraine, with eight more to follow. The United States also left then, according to The New York Times, knowing it would deliver an unknown number of navigating drones. John Kirby, spokesman for the Biden administration, told reporters at the time, “I can promise you that those darn things work.” Ukraine has had to promise not to use NATO weapons in attacks on Russian territory, and therefore regularly emphasizes that it built the drones used itself.
Sea drones are not only effective, but also relatively cheap. According to the BBC, there are sea drones that cost no more than 227,000 euros, which is a lot less than an expensive long-range missile. Moreover, they have the advantage that they are easy to operate, so that no crews need to be trained.
