Two Neptune missiles sank the Moskva in April 2022, the Slava-class cruiser that had been the Black Sea Fleet's flagship, making it the first major Russian maritime loss of the full-scale invasion. That was the original, shorter-range version of the missile. On September 9, an upgraded variant called Long Neptune, stretched and fitted with extra fuel tanks to push its range from roughly 300 kilometers past 500, struck three more Russian vessels moored at Novorossiya: the frigates Admiral Essen and Admiral Makarov, and a Buyan-M class corvette. It's the first time this longer-ranged version has been used against a ship rather than a target on land.
Satellite imagery, published by open-source tracker Exilenova+ a day after Ukraine's navy first announced the strike, shows just how much damage was actually done. The Buyan-M took the worst of it, everything aft of the superstructure, including its entire vertical launch missile bank, appears to have burned and structurally collapsed, with debris scattered across the stern. Both Grigorovich-class frigates sustained moderate to severe damage near their own launch cells and forward superstructures, likely stripping both ships of any remaining ability to fire either air-defense or anti-ship missiles. Naval News, which has been tracking this specific mooring site since a mid-August drone strike hit some of the same vessels, noted Russia had apparently rearranged how its ships were parked in the meantime, presumably to make them harder to target. It didn't work well enough this time; this round of damage looks considerably worse than August's.
The bigger picture is what makes this single strike matter beyond three damaged hulls. Naval News's own tally puts Russia's entire Kalibr-capable surface and submarine fleet across the Black Sea and Caspian at a theoretical maximum of 17 vessels, three Grigorovich frigates, four Buyan-M corvettes, three Karakurt corvettes, and seven Kilo-class submarines. Of the nine vessels actually accounted for in the current tally, six are now out of service from damage: two Grigorovich frigates, one Karakurt, one Buyan-M, and two Kilo-class submarines. Three more ships, the remaining Grigorovich and two Kilos, are separately stuck outside the Black Sea entirely because Turkey has kept the Bosphorus closed to warships since the war began. Add it up and Russia's actual working inventory of ships capable of launching Kalibr cruise missiles from this theater has been reduced to a fraction of what it started the war with.
What makes Neptune specifically dangerous to that remaining fleet is less its punch and more its supply. Ukraine has far more Neptunes available, and far fewer restrictions on how it can use them, than it does with donated Western weapons like Storm Shadow, which come with usage conditions attached by the countries that supplied them. A domestically produced missile with no strings attached and a demonstrated 400-kilometer-plus reach against moving maritime targets is a genuinely harder problem for Russia's navy to plan around than an occasional Western-supplied strike would be, precisely because Ukraine controls its own production and its own rules of engagement for using it.
None of this means the Black Sea Fleet is finished as a fighting force, ships can be repaired, and Russia has shown it can still surge replacement vessels and adapt its mooring patterns in response to previous strikes. But the trend line across just the past month, an August drone raid followed by a considerably more damaging September missile strike using a longer-range weapon making its combat debut against ships, points in one direction. Whatever capacity the Black Sea Fleet has left to actually launch cruise missiles at Ukraine keeps shrinking, and Ukraine keeps finding new ways to make sure it shrinks further.
No comments:
Post a Comment