Key Points – After suffering devastating naval losses in the Black Sea at the hands of Ukrainian asymmetric warfare, including drones and anti-ship missiles that sank its flagship Moskva, Vladimir Putin has launched an initiative to “re-vamp” the Russian Navy.
-However, this plan faces deep skepticism due to Russia’s struggling, sanctions-hit shipyards and the appointment of former KGB hardliner Nikolai Patrushev to lead the effort.
-The new naval strategy remains vague and reportedly fails to address the unmanned drone threat that has crippled the fleet.
-Given these industrial and strategic shortcomings, a true revitalization of Russian naval power appears improbable.
After Black Sea Humiliation, Putin’s Plan to Revive Russian Navy Faces Hurdles
WARSAW, POLAND – From the early days of the Ukraine War, Russia’s Navy has suffered more than a few dramatic defeats and embarrassing combat losses. Foremost among those is the sinking in April of the Black Sea Fleet’s flagship, the Moskva guided-missile cruiser.
The ship was hit by two Ukrainian-made DKB Luch R-360 Neptune Anti-Ship Missiles (ASM), a $750 million loss on the Russian Ministry of Defense ledger. The exact number of those among the ship’s 500 crew members lost has never been revealed.
“It is a credit to the ingenuity of the Ukrainian military,” said Dr. Zbigniew Pisarski, the Director of Poland’s defense analysis and foreign policy think-tank, the Fundacja im. Kazimierza Pułaskiego in Warsaw.
“Here is a country [Ukraine] with virtually no navy to speak of, no submarines or the kind of assets that would threaten capital ships of the Russian fleet. And yet they have managed to inflict such losses on Moscow’s Black Sea naval flotilla that its ships—the ones that are left, that is—have all fled their original bases for port facilities further away from the fighting.”
Since the beginning of the war, Ukraine has destroyed roughly one-third of the Black Sea Fleet.
However, it has been accomplished not through force-on-force naval engagements but through the asymmetric warfare for which Ukraine has become famous.
This asymmetric action has involved employing drone boat attacks and ASM strikes, among other unconventional means. More recently, another home-grown Ukrainian system, the “Magura” unmanned underwater maritime drone, has neutralized Russian operations in the northern Black Sea and even near Moscow’s naval base at Novorossiysk.
Another KGB Alumni
It is this series of setbacks and combat losses in the Black Sea that is prompting Russian President Vladimir Putin to order a new strategic initiative to “revamp his country’s battered image as a naval power.”
Russia’s chances of re-vitalizing its naval power seem improbable, given the stories of the difficulties encountered at the naval shipyards while trying to just maintain the ships already in service. One of the maritime news reporting services noted that these shipyard facilities are now only a shadow of what they once were during the Cold War.
“Sanctions have made it harder to get key parts and equipment for shipbuilding and ship repair, slowing down Russia’s shipyard sector. The service’s sole aircraft carrier, the aging Admiral Kuznetzov, has been under repair since at least 2018; some analysts believe that it will never deploy again, leaving Russia without the prestige and power projection capability of carrier aviation,” reads the report on Maritime Executive following Putin’s announcement.
However, what has been the source of even greater skepticism is the individual Putin tapped to lead this initiative to bring Russia’s Navy back to life.
Putin has reached back into the ranks of his old comrades who served with him in the Soviet-era KGB to select Kremlin aide Nikolai Patrushev. The former KGB officer and one-time head of Russia’s Security Council told Russian state media outlets that a new but still unrevealed strategy for a new-age Russian Navy has been finalized.
In his words from an interview he sat for, he characterized Russia’s maritime power status as “gradually recovering.”
Uncertain—Some Say Improbable—Future
“It is impossible to carry out such work without a long-term vision of the scenarios for the development of the situation in the oceans, the evolution of challenges and threats, and, of course, without defining the goals and objectives facing the Russian Navy,” Patrushev told the state-owned publication Argumenti i Facti.
However, Ukraine’s literal re-invention of many aspects of warfare has experts questioning whether the traditional role once occupied by organized navies and surface ships remains relevant today. Very little—if anything—has been said in Russian about the role of unmanned maritime drones in combat on the high seas and how that should inform any new naval strategy.
Adding to the argument by those who claim that reviving naval fortunes is a vain hope is the fact that Patrushev has a reputation for spouting what have been called “barking mad” conspiracy theories—and generally having a view of the world that almost no one regards as logical or judicious.
His improbable views about Russia’s enemies—real or imagined—have had great utility in providing the intellectual underpinnings “for the Putin regime’s expansionism abroad and repression at home.” But there is little about his background that would indicate the sober and empirical approach to solving problems needed to rescue Russia’s Navy from its accelerating decline.
In his interview, Patrushev said the new Russian naval strategy “answers the fundamental question of what Russia’s naval power must look like in order to effectively defend its interests in the world’s oceans.” However, no real details on the plan have been released.
For his part, Putin had previously authorized a $100 billion shipbuilding budget for the period 2025-35. Perhaps the details will soon be forthcoming—just as soon as sometime tells us where that money is coming from.
About the Author:
Reuben F. Johnson is a survivor of the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and is 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.
Russia’s Bomber Forces
Tu-22M3: The Bomber Ukraine Hit With Drones
intp1
June 12, 2025 at 7:37 am
I think that the Russians have decided that large, surface tartgets are obselete and are only building smaller corvettes etc with hypersonic missiles which can easily send everything the enemy has up to and especially carriers to the bottom
Meanwhile under the surface Russia is still and will likely remain a superpower.
he Russian Navy operates approximately 75 submarines with multiple rolling updated classes
ATTACK Subs
Nuclear-Powered – 23 Active within 4 classes
Non-Nuclear Powered – 23 Active in 2 classes
Ballistic Missile (ICBM)- 12 Active in 2 classes
Cruise Missile Subs – 8 Active 1 class
Special Operations Subs -9 Active in 5 classes
This is where they are world leaders. These submarines can take out all Western fleets above and below the surface AND could decimate whole continents like the the Americas and Europe in an afternoon.
PS the Moskva was built in the 70s, They saved on the de-the commissioning.