Is the Black Sea Fleet no more? Recent attacks by drones and missiles have whittled it down to a shadow of its former self. Grant Shapps, the UK secretary of state for defense, said, “Putin’s continued illegal occupation of Ukraine is exacting a massive cost on Russia’s Black Sea Fleet which is now functionally inactive. Russia has sailed the Black Sea since 1783 but is now forced to constrain its fleet to port. And even there Putin’s ships are sinking!”
But does the fleet actually matter anymore to Russia’s overall mission against Ukraine and any potential war versus NATO? Some analysts have argued that Russia has stopped relying on the BSF to supply its forces in Crimea and replaced it with a new rail capability along the coast of the Sea of Azov.
Forbes reports:
The hits have come too late to serve another war aim: strangling the Russian field armies in occupied southern Ukraine. As recently as a few weeks ago, the Kremlin counted on the Black Sea Fleet’s landing ships, as well as the rail and road bridge connecting Russia to Crimea, to supply its southern regiments and brigades.
Back then, it was possible effectively to cut off the southern Russian forces by sinking landing ships and striking the bridge—two things Ukrainian forces did with some regularity.
No longer. A herculean effort by Russian engineers has added a new railway connecting Rostov in southern Russia to the Russian-occupied Ukrainian cities of Donetsk and—in the south—Berdyansk and Mariupol. The new rail line decreases by days the time it takes to move a freight car from southern Russia to southern Ukraine.
We should understand land operations and the fight for control of the Black Sea and Sea of Azov as a struggle for lines of supply to forces ashore. As President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told his troops after the most recent strike on the Russian naval base at Sevastopol: “I am grateful to all of our heroes who destroy enemy logistics in the occupied territories… who clear Crimea and the Black Sea of the occupiers’ presence… step by step. Everyone sees it. I would also like to express my gratitude to all units of our Defense Forces that reduce Russia’s war potential.”
Once it is understood that the War in Ukraine is in large part about interdicting logistics, it naturally opens the subject of deep strike warfare, viewed as the key to unlocking a WWI-type front. Both Ukraine and Russia have been hitting targets way behind the lines, as far west as Lviv and as far east as Moscow itself. But these cannot be desultory. For deep strike to work it must reach a certain scale. “Deep strike… requires the capability to generate and sustain sorties and to maintain a high rate of attack, both to cover the target sets and to keep the enemy from bouncing back.”
Neither has achieved such scale. Russia perhaps because it cannot. The West so far because it will not. The Biden administration both desires and fears deep strike. “Until recently, the United States appeared hesitant to provide deep-strike arms… the White House seemed to fear that dispatching combat aircraft to Ukraine might cross a Russian red line,” RAND notes. Out of these concerns it has given Kyiv relatively few long-range weapons, even if this means Ukraine’s armies must face longer odds.
The Biden administration has even urged Ukraine to stop bombing Russia’s oil plants because the world needs cheap fossil fuel. “The U.S. has pressed Ukraine to halt drone strikes on Russian energy facilities, fearing that it could provoke massive retaliation and drive up global oil prices,” writes Politico.
The U.S. is concerned that targeting Russia’s energy facilities will impact the Kremlin’s oil production capacity and drive up global prices — ahead of a knife-edge presidential election where prices at the gas pump are bound to be a contentious topic. The sources also fear that these repeated strikes will provoke Russia into retaliating and targeting energy infrastructure the West relies on, including oil pipelines.
To a great extent, the stalemate in Ukraine reflects the fact that Washington, Europe, and Moscow would rather a stalemate because they fear victory would be too dangerous, yet they desire victory nevertheless, politically oscillating between these two poles. Rather than going all out one way or the other, Washington has gone wait-and-see, reacting as the Europeans, Ukrainians, and Russians expand the war by slow degrees, a little here, a little there but always more. For its own reasons, the administration deems it OK to “go with the flow” as long as the administration can’t be blamed for it.
But that doesn’t mean danger is past. It’s as if we were watching a rowboat above Niagra Falls, with Joe dipping the paddle in the water to one side or the other while it drifts toward the thundering cataract, pointing it in various directions without altering the inexorable drift. Rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Because when you come right down to it, once the war started in 2022, somebody had to lose it. That unavoidable fact is haunting everyone because the West doesn’t want to lose. Putin doesn’t want to lose. But somebody — absent a mutual settlement — has to lose.
Although the debate over how much military aid to send Ukraine is important, the composition of the weapons is equally so. It reflects strategy or perhaps the lack of it. More artillery ammo, tactical weapons, etc. means a commitment in high councils to the strategy of attrition. More deep strikes and more advanced systems mean “let’s win” has the upper hand. Nobody seems to have decided which of the two they’re even going to try to achieve. Maybe we’ll just drift along and see what happens and hope that for once Joe Biden’s bad luck turns into good fortune.