By Olha Chepil | 2024-05-15

KYIV -- Ukraine has destroyed one third of Russia's Black Sea Fleet of 80 warships, but Russian leaders do not realize the severity of their losses and are turning a blind eye to sailors' deaths, analysts say.

"The Black Sea Fleet is slowly sinking," said Ivan Kirichevsky, a Kyiv-based military analyst with Defense Express.

Ukraine has decimated the Black Sea Fleet with missile strikes and attack drones, driving its remaining ships to flee the peninsula.

"They are currently in a ... dead end," Ukrainian navy spokesman Capt. 3rd Rank Dmytro Pletenchuk said April 23 on the Freedom TV YouTube channel. "They understand that they virtually can't attack. But they also can't leave the basin."

Grasping for solutions, the Kremlin sacked the Russian navy commander in March and the Black Sea Fleet commander in April.

"Every change of commander is evidence that the fleet command isn't coping with the threat level," said Pavlo Lakiychuk, a reservist captain 1st rank and director of security projects at the Strategy XXI Center for Global Studies.

"The Russian Black Sea Fleet was assigned specific tasks by the top military leadership. They thought that they could be accomplished. But nothing worked out," he said. "And then things got even worse: image damage."

Leisure sailing, corruption

Now Russia is trying to polish its image by sending Pacific Fleet ships around the world, Lakiychuk said.

In March, a Russian missile cruiser and the frigate Marshal Shaposhnikov passed through the Gulf of Aden and entered the Red Sea.

In April, the Varyag missile cruiser moved through the Suez Canal to the Mediterranean Sea for the first time since 2022.

The roots of Russian military dysfunction are embedded in the culture of corruption throughout the government, the Foreign Policy Research Institute said in a March 2023 report.

Timur Ivanov, a deputy defense minister and longtime ally of Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, faces up to 15 years in prison for bribe-taking "on a particularly large scale," the news service for Moscow courthouses said April 24.

No one wants to serve in the Black Sea Fleet under incompetent commanders, say analysts.

Some sailors pay bribes to join the Pacific or Northern fleet, said Lakiychuk, adding those fleets have lucrative smuggling opportunities.

Meanwhile, Russian casualties keep rising.

Over 100 Russian soldiers are believed to have been killed when Ukrainian forces shelled them in Luhansk province with at least three US-supplied long-range Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS), OSINTtechnical, an open-source intelligence X account, said May 1.

About 500,000 Russian troops have been killed or wounded in Ukraine since February 2022, France estimated earlier this month.