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RUSSIA THE RUSSIAN NAVY The Military Show: Russia's NAVY on Edge of Total COLLAPSE! PLAY YOUTUBE VIDEO Original article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9aQIRR0oFk
Russia's NAVY on Edge of Total COLLAPSE! The Military Show Aug 6, 2024 1.79M subscribers ... 1,432,425 views ... 15K likes #themilitaryshow #militarydevelopments #UkraineWar In this video, we delve into the surprising struggles of Russia's navy in the Ukraine war. Despite boasting a formidable fleet, the Russian Navy has failed to secure a decisive advantage in the Black Sea. Ukraine's innovative use of drones and missiles has turned the tide, neutralizing key Russian naval assets and hindering their ability to launch ground assaults. Meanwhile, geopolitical challenges, like Turkey's control over the Turkish Straits, further complicate Russia's naval operations. We'll explore the strategic, technical, and political factors contributing to Russia's maritime woes and discuss what the future holds for its navy. #UkraineWar 🇺🇦 #RussianNavy ⚓️ #BlackSea #MilitaryAnalysis #NavalWarfare 🚢 #RussiaUkraineConflict #GlobalFirepower #Geopolitics #NATO #MilitaryStrategy #TurkishStraits #DroneWarfare #NavalDefense #UkraineResilience #RussiaMilitary #NavalAssets #MilitaryTechnology #WarInUkraine #SeaDomination #UkraineWarAnalysis #RussiaChallenges #NavalPower #MilitaryConflicts #WarStrategy #DefenseAnalysis #MilitaryInsights #RussiaVsUkraine #BlackSeaFleet #RussiaUkraineWar2024 #NavalCorruption #UkraineDefense #MilitaryHistory #militarystrategy #militarydevelopments #militaryanalysis #themilitaryshow SOURCES: https://pastebin.com/mdvsCumq Peter Burgess COMMENTARY Peter Burgess Transcript 0:00 Russia’s navy was supposed to be one of its key advantages in the Ukraine War. The dreaded Black Sea Fleet alone should have caused major problems for Ukraine’s defenders. Through complete domination of the Black Sea, Russia should have been able to use its naval power to take several key territories, including Mariupol, Odessa, and Mykolaiv. Ukraine’s south should have been in Russia’s hands, both thanks to bombardments from the sea and – once those three key territories were taken – the insertion of ground forces via the coast that would have forced Ukraine to fight on both the southern and eastern fronts of its country. But that hasn’t happened. Rather than being one of the key advantages it has in the war, Russia’s navy has proven to be little more than a damp squib that has been wholly ineffectual in supporting the country’s ground troops in Ukraine. The question now is simple: Why? Why is Russia’s navy in such serious trouble, not only in Ukraine but for the foreseeable future? Before we answer that question it’s important to dig into the level of power Russia’s navy is supposed to have. After all, it’s fighting against a country that has no navy of its own, 1:02 so there should be no reason why Russia is in such trouble on the water. For that power assessment, we turn to Global Firepower, or GFP. Each year, GFP ranks 145 countries using over 60 data points to determine which are the most powerful in the world. As of 2024, Russia ranks second on that list, with Ukraine landing at 18th. That’s already a large disparity, but the gulf in strength – at least, on paper – only becomes larger when you start digging into each country’s navy. According to GFP, Russia is supposed to have the strongest navy in the world. At the very least, it has the largest with 781 naval assets compared to just 104 for Ukraine. Russia has 65 submarines, again earning it the number one ranking in terms of volume of assets, along with 14 destroyers, 12 frigates, and 83 corvettes. As for Ukraine, it has none of any of those types of ships. In fact, it has practically no warships at all, with its navy primarily consisting of patrol vessels and a handful of mine warfare 2:01 ships. Even on those fronts, Russia is well ahead – it has 122 patrol vessels to Ukraine’s 33 and 47 mine warfare ships to Ukraine’s three. The naval battle shouldn’t even be a contest. And yet, Russia is not only failing to win the fight in the Black Sea, but it’s actively losing so many ships that its navy has become ineffectual. The fleet, which numbers somewhere between 60 and 80 ships, and has 50,000 personnel, has been wracked by attack after attack from Ukraine, with the country claiming to have knocked out around a third of the fleet since February 2024. To understand how substantial a blow this has been to Russia’s naval strategy, it’s worth examining each of those strikes in order. First came the Moskva, a Slava-class guided missile cruiser that Ukraine destroyed in April 2022 using a pair of Neptune missiles. At over 16 feet long and capable of carrying an explosive warhead weighing 330 pounds, the Neptune can be fired from land and travel up to 186 miles before detonating on a target. Therein we see a hint 3:02 toward Ukraine’s general strategy when it comes to Russia’s Black Sea Fleet – rather than trying to confront Russian warships with patrol boats, it’s simply firing on them using missiles from the country’s coast. Taking out a Slava-class cruiser like the Moskva was a big win for Ukraine. With the sinking of that ship came the loss of a vessel that carries 64 S-300PMU Favorit surface-to-air, or SAM, missiles, as well as a Zif-122 retractable launcher capable of firing 9M33M missiles. Russia tried to downplay the loss of the ship. It claimed that Ukraine hadn’t sunk it at all. Rather, the Moskva was damaged due to a fire caused by the detonation of its own ammunition as it fired on Ukraine. That, combined with stormy conditions in the Black Sea, led to its sinking. It wouldn’t be long before Ukraine revealed that to be a lie. In May 2022, Ukraine used Bayraktar drones – which are made in Turkey and have become something of an emblem for Ukraine’s resistance – to destroy a trio of Russian Raptor-class patrol boats while damaging two more. While these boats don’t have the missile launching capabilities of 4:04 the Slava class, they’re high-speed vessels that are used to cut off sabotage attempts and conduct search-and-rescue missions. With them out of the picture, Ukraine managed to take out some vital support vessels in the Black Sea Fleet. The strikes kept coming. At around the same time as it was taking out these ships, reports started surfacing that Ukraine had managed to sink the Tapir-class Saratov ship. That would be another huge strike for Ukraine if it were true, as the Tapir-class is a massive landing vessel capable of transporting up to 1,000 tons of cargo and between 313 and 440 troops – along with around 50 vehicles – to the Ukrainian coast. It also carries 24 SAM missiles, along with a 40-tube A-215 Grad M rocket artillery launcher and 160 rockets. Again, Russia wouldn’t confirm the sinking. At least, that was until March 2023, when it finally admitted the loss. Reports suggest that Ukraine took this ship out with a Soviet-era Tochka-U ballistic missile – a Soviet weapon 5:00 to destroy a Soviet ship. With the loss of the Saratov, Russia also lost one of the most important ships it had in terms of landing troops in south Ukraine, meaning it would increasingly struggle to create the second southern front that it hoped would stretch Ukraine’s army thin. The losses kept on coming. May 2022 also saw the destruction of a 02510 BK-16E assault boat, which is another support vessel designed to offer fire support during coastal landings as well as take part in rescue and anti-sabotage missions. That was followed in June 2022 by the sinking of the Vasily Bekh rescue tug board, with this sinking involving a pair of Harpoon missiles and being documented in a video that purported to show the attack. So, by the end of June, Ukraine had already sunk a major landing vessel, several Russian support ships, and a missile cruiser. For the next few months, Ukraine appeared to settle down. Then, October 2022 came, bringing with it the damaging of the Ivan Golubets in an attack on the ship while it was docked in the Sevastopol port of Crimea. That attack made heavy use of drones, with Ukraine reporting the 6:02 use of nine unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, along with seven “maritime drones,” which are essentially small ships that run kamikaze attacks on larger vessels. Therein lies another hint to the evolving approach Ukraine was taking with Russia’s navy. In addition to firing on the Black Sea Fleet using missiles, it was using both aerial and water-based drones – with no pilots meaning no manpower risks – to attack Russia’s ships. By this point, Russia had drastically slowed down any operations in the Black Sea. Its dreaded fleet was barely present, meaning Ukraine couldn’t sink any more ships, but Russia also couldn’t use its fleet to bring pressure to bear or create a southern front in Ukraine. It would be almost a year before Ukraine claimed another ship from the fleet. Come September 2023, Ukraine was again using Bayraktar drones, this time in an attack on a Project 640 patrol boat leading to its destruction as the ship unloaded cargo. That attack was quickly followed by strikes on three more Russian landing ships – the Minsk, Olenegorsky Gornyak, and an unnamed vessel. All three were Ropucha-class vessels that, 7:04 though smaller than the Saratov, were each still capable of landing 500 tons of cargo and up to 340 soldiers on Ukraine’s shores. The Olenegorsky Gornyak and the unnamed vessel were both damaged but salvageable. As for the Minsk, it wasn’t sunk, but it was damaged so heavily that repairing it would be uneconomical for Russia. So, it had to eat another loss, with Ukraine’s use of cruise missiles once again coming to the fore in this attack. A couple of months later, Ukraine took out even more Russian landing vessels. In that incident, it went back to drones to take out a pair of Serna-class small landing ships, with one being destroyed outright while the other took heavy damage. November 2023 also saw a strike against the Askold, a Karakut-class cruise missile cruiser capable of firing both Kalibr and Oniks missiles, followed by the damaging of an Ondatra-class landing craft in the same month. That landing craft was again a target of Ukraine’s kamikaze drone boats. Who needs a navy when you can send unmanned vessels out to destroy opposing ships? 8:03 December brought with it the sinking of the Novocherkassk, another Ropucha-class landing ship that was believed to have 77 sailors on board at the time of its destruction. The Ivanovets followed in February 2024. A Tarantul-III-class corvette, it’s yet another ship that could have been involved in missile strikes along the Ukrainian coast if it wasn’t for Ukraine’s use of MAGURA V5 naval drones to utterly destroy it. And Ukraine has kept going as we’ve moved deeper into 2024. February also saw the sinking of another Ropucha-class landing vessel – the Caesar Kunikov – using MAGURA V5 drones, with those same drones also being responsible for sinking a large patrol boat named the Sergey Kotov a month later. March also saw Ukraine damage the Yamal and Azov – yet more Ropucha-class landing ships – in an attack on the vessels while they were stationed in Sevastopol. An amphibious landing ship named the Konstantin Olshansky was also destroyed in a missile strike in March 2024. Finally, there’s the Ivan Khurs. 9:02 Launched in 2017, the ship is part of Russia’s Project 18280 Intelligence Ship initiative and contains an MR-231-3 navigation radar that Russia would have used to track Ukraine’s drones had the ship not been damaged in a missile attack in April 2024. So, where does all of this leave the Black Sea Fleet? Frankly, the fleet that was supposed to play such a pivotal role in the war has been rendered practically useless. Ukraine has done an excellent job of targeting the fleet’s lading vessels, consistently lowering its ability to land troops in the south of Ukraine. It’s also taken out several warships, including missile cruisers that could have battered the Ukrainian coast, along with a host of support vessels to make it even harder for Russia’s navy to conduct operations in the Black Sea. Damaging the Ivan Khurs was another major coup – the less intelligence Russia can gather in the Black Sea, the worse its ability to handle Ukraine’s constant drone and missile strikes becomes. Taking out a vessel that also had electronic warfare capabilities is just the icing on the cake. Tactically, Ukraine has clearly 10:03 come out on top here. Drones and missiles have proven to be a worthy defense against a powerful Russian naval force. Still, some questions arise about Russia’s navy in the wake of these attacks. The Black Sea Fleet has 80 vessels at most, with the number likely being closer to 60. The Russian Navy has almost 750 assets to its name. Why doesn’t it just send so many ships into the Black Sea that it overwhelms Ukraine’s defenses through sheer numbers? After all, that’s the approach it’s taking on land, with Russia seemingly only gaining ground because it’s able to quickly replace the hundreds of thousands of troops who have already been killed or injured in the war. Surely, the point of having such a large navy is to avoid situations where small contingents of ships can be picked off one by one. Russia would do that were it not for the one thing standing in its way: Turkey. Ever since the days of the Ottoman Empire, simple geography has given Turkey the most influence over the Black Sea. That’s because the country oversees both the Dardanelles, which connect to Sea of Marmara to the Aegean Sea, 11:00 and the Bosporus, which links the Sea of Marmara to the Black Sea. Collectively, these two passages are known as The Turkish Straits, and they’re the only way for any ships to enter the Black Sea from the Mediterranean. For centuries, The Turkish Straits offered Turkey practically complete control over the Black Sea, essentially transforming the body of water into a Turkish lake. That started to change in the 20th century. Though Turkey still controlled its vital straits, increasing Soviet influence in the wake of the 1936 Montreux Convention resulted in an agreement that regulated the passage of ships into the Black Sea. The Soviet Union gained influence in the Black Sea, resulting in it placing pressure on Turkey to give up at least part of its ownership of The Turkish Strait. That pressure indirectly led to Turkey becoming one of the earliest members of NATO – it joined in 1952 – with the addition of Romania and Bulgaria to that alliance in 2004 reinforcing Turkish control over passage into the Black Sea based on its ownership of the vital straits. Where does all of this leave the Russian navy in the war against Ukraine? It’s unable to replenish the Black Sea Fleet with new ships. 12:02 As GIS reports, Turkey chose to close The Turkish Straits to the transit of military vessels that don’t call the Black Sea their home base. So, the Black Sea Fleet could come and go as it pleased, though it was unlikely to leave given that it was fighting Ukraine. But any other Russian ships weren’t allowed through under Article 19 of the Montreux Convention. Turkey can even claim neutrality here, as it has disallowed passage for all military vessels, not just Russian ships. As one senior American official puts it, Turkey’s move is “a very important contribution to Ukraine’s security,” due to it essentially suspending naval traffic in and out of the sea. The move also presents other problems to Russia. Not only can it not supplement the Black Sea Fleet with other ships, but it also can’t get the ships it has stationed in the Black Sea back out again. There is no escape – those ships, which have already proven ineffectual in the war, are sitting ducks that could become the victims of Ukrainian missile and drone strikes should they venture out too far into the Black Sea. Russia’s navy is in a catch-22 situation. 13:01 As GIS notes, Russia could attempt to apply pressure on Turkey to open up The Turkish Straits to military vessels again. But if that happens, the benefits that come from bolstering the Black Sea Fleet could be canceled out by the move also allowing NATO, Ukraine’s allies, and Ukraine itself to send ships into the sea. It’s not too far of a stretch to think that one of Ukraine’s many allies would consider donating ships to its navy so that it could establish a stronger presence in the Black Sea if The Turkish Straits opened up again. Far more likely is that Turkey will simply keep the straits closed, reinforcing its control over the Black Sea while ensuring that Russia’s navy can’t strike Ukraine. Still, maybe Russia has other options. For instance, the Baltic Sea could offer a route into Ukraine. After all, the Russian port in Kaliningrad opens out into the sea and Russia maintains a Baltic Fleet that’s around 43 ships strong. However, just like the many Russian ships that can’t get into the Black Sea, the Baltic Fleet is essentially isolated from the fighting. That’s because the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad is surrounded by Ukrainian 14:00 allies – Poland to the south and Lithuania to the east. Neither is willing to allow Russia to transport troops via the Baltic Sea into Ukraine or, more importantly, into Belarus via the Suwalki Gap. The breakout of war has essentially seen that gap – which offers passage from the Baltic Sea into Belarus – shut down entirely. This is important because Belarus is a Russian ally and has already been used by Moscow as a launching point for its ground invasion of Ukraine. Now, it can’t access that friendly state via the Baltic Sea, essentially making the Baltic Fleet useless. The situation is so bad that Russia’s navy has essentially given up on the idea of using the Baltic Fleet to put pressure on Ukraine. As Foreign Policy reported in September 2022, several defense officials claim that Russia has basically pulled personnel from that fleet to send them into Ukraine as ground forces. The Baltic Fleet itself essentially sits dormant. By this point, you can see why the Russian navy is in serious trouble in terms of the war in Ukraine. The Baltic Fleet is so useless to Russia against Ukraine that it’s pulling sailors out of ships 15:00 to have them serve on the ground. As for the Black Sea Fleet, which was supposed to dominate the body of water in which it was stationed while giving Russia the ability to land soldiers and conduct missile strikes, it’s getting whittled away by the month. A third of that fleet is already destroyed or damaged. It can’t be reinforced due to Turkey’s control over The Turkish Straits, and it also can’t escape the Black Sea due to those straits being closed to military vessels in both directions. Russia also appears to have miscalculated strategically – it didn’t expect drone and missile strikes from Ukraine to devastate its ships, likely because Russia believed it would win the war in short order. All of this explains why Russia’s navy is in serious trouble in a specific situation. But what about the future? Unfortunately for Russia, the future looks almost as grim as the situation in which it finds itself in the Black Sea. That may seem a strange claim to make given that Russia has very publicly proclaimed that it’s going to be strengthening its navy in 2024. This year, it plans to receive 12 new warships alongside a fleet of 38 smaller craft. By all accounts, Russia’s already large navy is growing. The 12 new warships are 10 more than 16:04 it received in 2023 and around double the amount it built per year on average during the 2010s. But there’s a problem. “More” doesn’t mean “better” with these warships, as the British newspaper The Telegraph reports. In June 2024, it pointed out that – barring its construction of submarines – the new vessels entering the Russian navy are both lighter and less well-armed than the ones that came before. Worse yet, those smaller vessels may not even be reliable. That’s because Ukraine was the main supplier of maritime engines to Russia before Russian President Vladimir Putin decided to launch his special military operation. With that supply naturally being cut off, Russia has been forced to resort to cobbling together engines on its own, with those engines barely being powerful enough to propel the smaller ships that it’s building. In other words, Russia is trading quality for quantity. While that may not be the worst approach in the world when it comes to a navy, especially as the largest navy is traditionally the one that wins in maritime battles, it’s building higher quantities of smaller ships. That’s a problem 17:01 when it comes to tonnage, which is a measure of the amount of water a navy displaces. Generally speaking, the larger the tonnage, the larger and more powerful the ships, meaning a navy can have fewer ships than an enemy but still have the advantage because of its high tonnage. The U.S. Navy offers a perfect example of this. In terms of naval assets, the U.S. has 472, making it the fourth-largest navy in the world when it comes to simple ship numbers. That places it behind Russia, which is first for assets, and China, which comes second with 730 assets. However, the U.S. Navy is considered far stronger than China’s because its ships displace a total of 3.6 million tons of water compared to just 2 million for the Chinese Navy. Higher tonnage means bigger ships, which means larger crews, more weapons, and greater protection against enemy missiles. Russia’s navy fares even worse. In 2019, its massive navy only displaced 1.21 million tons – less than a seventh of the U.S. Navy. Part of that comes down to its focus on submarines ahead of surface ships, 18:00 though the U.S. practically matches Russia in that department. More tellingly, Russia clearly prefers to build smaller surface ships so that it has more assets at sea, only those assets don’t come close to matching the power of its rivals. We’ve seen the impact of this approach in Ukraine. Many of Ukraine’s missile and drone strikes against Russian warships and landing vessels have worked so well because those ships are susceptible due to their size. So having more ships doesn’t mean much if they can’t stand up to attacks. In a March 2023 article, The Jamestown Foundation also notes that Russia’s strategic approach to shipbuilding is off. In addition to placing its focus on submarines – with large-scale small-ship construction being intended to project power rather than actually wield power – Russia’s navy spreads itself too thin with construction projects. It points to the state-owned United Shipbuilding Corporation’s fiscal results from 2022, which showed that it achieved $5.55 billion in revenue for the year but still posted a loss of several hundred million dollars. That’s because the organization is working on many different ships at once, all of which are experiencing 19:01 construction delays due to a lack of access to the materials necessary to build them. It’s here where we start to see the impact of Western sanctions on Russia’s navy. All of this adds up to a navy that is failing to increase its power even though it’s receiving more ships. What it’s receiving are warships that are smaller and less powerful than what it’s losing. So, even as the Russian navy grows in numbers, assuming that even happens given the effectiveness of Ukraine’s tactics in the Black Sea, it’s still going to come out of the Ukraine war with a weaker navy than it had when it went in. And that’s a navy that will only grow weaker in comparison to the U.S. and its NATO rivals if it continues along the same course. It’s a navy that will grow weaker still thanks to one more endemic problem: Corruption. One of the main reasons Russia’s Navy is in the sorry state in which it currently finds itself is that the people being tasked with making it stronger are instead lining their own pockets. That’s the conclusion of Action on Armed Violence, or AOAV, which published an article in August 2023 discussing the depths of corruption inside Russia’s military. When speaking of the country’s navy, it mentioned the State Armament Program, 20:03 which Russia has in place to revitalize its navy so that it reaches a similar level of strength to what it was during the Soviet era. However, much of the money that’s meant to go toward that strengthening simply isn’t going where it should. For instance, mere weeks before the sinking of the Moskva in the Black Sea, a Russian naval officer was arrested alongside two contract executives. Their crimes? Siphoning 692 million rubles – approximately $7.9 million – away from a project intended to upgrade Russian naval missiles between 2012 and 2014. Caravanserai, an overseas news website, digs deeper into that case, noting that the naval officer – Captain First Rank Igor Supranovich – had disregarded a list of approved contractors to choose an unknown firm for the project. Valeriy Klochok, the director of Vezha Public Analytics Center and a political analyst, says that this is a classic Russian scheme. “A procurement order is created for a specific person, it is executed, money is paid from the budget, and then comes the kickback.” These issues have plagued the State 21:00 Armament Program. As AOAV highlights, the program has thus far only managed to deliver about a third of the frigates it promised, along with just a fifth of the corvettes it was supposed to deliver, to the navy. Corruption combined with bureaucracy has clogged the gears of the Russian naval machine. Money is being misspent, maintenance isn’t being carried out, and, in many cases, orders simply aren’t being fulfilled. It all adds up to a navy that is not only in serious trouble in Ukraine but has a very dim future ahead of it. At worst, the days of Russia being a leading naval power are on the verge of ending. After all, even having the world’s largest navy doesn’t mean much if the ships aren’t fit for purpose. But what do you think? Are things as bad as they seem for Russia’s navy or will the country turn its situation around with enough time and investment? Will Russia manage to make inroads in the Black Sea, perhaps by convincing Turkey to relinquish its hold on The Turkish Straits? Tell us what you think below and thank you for watching the video. Now go check out Why ALL Russian Weapons Are So BAD! or click this other video instead!

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