The Russian Black Sea Fleet has scattered to escape repeated Ukrainian strikes and consequently is now too far away from the war to be able to engage in it, a functional defeat, the British Armed Forces Minister said on Tuesday.
While Ukraine had considerable successes in the land war in 2022 these were not forthcoming in 2023, but that doesn’t mean they are without progress in pushing Russia back, the British Armed Forces Minister told a conference. James Heappey pointed to Ukraine’s strikes against the Russian navy as a clear measure of their progress at the Warsaw Security Forum on Tuesday, arguing the force is no longer able to function to support the war and therefore has been functionally defeated.
Heappey expressed his view, telling the conference: “the progress in Ukraine over the past few months has been slow, nobody can pretend otherwise, but anyone who thinks there was no progress at all is simply wrong… the importance of what has happened in the Black Sea over the last couple of weeks where a Russian submarine and a Russian ship have been put out of action and the headquarters of the Black Sea Fleet has been put out of action too.”
Speaking of what these strikes mean in aggregate, the minister continued: “The functional defeat of the Black Sea Fleet — and I would argue that is what it is because it has been forced to disperse to ports from which it cannot have an effect on Ukraine — and every bit as important as [what was happening on land] last year.”
Heappey’s comments on the capability of the Black Sea Fleet having been considerably diminished by the Ukrainian cruise missile strikes follow recent Ministry of Defence intelligence digests which have claimed the fleet has recently sustained “severe but localised” damage which “diminish” its ability to fulfil key wartime roles. Ukraine’s “dynamic, deep strike battle” against the Russian fleet is “likely forcing Russia into a reactive posture”, it was said.
A subsequent update underlined the scattering of the fleet to safer anchorages away from Ukrainian territory, stating that elements of the fleet were dispersing to Novorossiysk, a Russian Black Sea port 200 miles east on the far side of Crimea, beyond the Kerch Strait.
Heappey’s comments came as he also discussed with fellow panellists the continuing issues the West are having in acquiring enough munitions to keep Ukrainian forces supplied. The minister spoke of how Europe has saved money by making defence procurement more efficient after the end of the Cold War, but this has also made industry less able to scale up in an emergency.
Europe once had a solid bedrock of industry that could be quickly repurposed to military production in a war, he said, but this had now all gone, with the minister saying it was no longer feasible to turn railway locomotive factories into tank plants as they simply didn’t exist.