Ukraine, After Victory in Black Sea, Aims To Expel Russian Air Power From Crimea

After winning the war in the Black Sea, Ukraine now focuses on fighting the air war. In 2023 and 2024, a punishing blitz of Ukrainian-made “Sea Baby” drones forced Russia’s Black Sea Fleet to abandon its headquarters at Sevastopol, the Crimean port founded in 1783 by Prince Potemkin.Surviving ships retreated 200 miles to the east to the mainland port of Novorossiysk. One week ago, a new Ukrainian device, a “Sub Sea Baby,” threaded its way through the steel nets of this port, the most highly defended in Russia. It exploded next to a Kilo-class submarine. On Saturday, Britain’s Defense Ministry reported that this strike “has likely resulted in significant damage to the submarine, leaving it unable to sail of its own accord or deploy.” In the Black Sea, Russia uses their Kilo submarines to fire Kalibr cruise missiles at Ukraine.“The Black Sea Fleet is on a terminal, downward spiral,” a St. Andrews University political strategist, Phillips O’Brien, wrote Sunday. “The Russians can no longer protect their most valuable assets in their most secure port, against a naval force that has no manned vessels.”After Russia lost the ability to project naval power from Crimea, Russia converted the peninsula into a granite aircraft carrier to project air power. Taking off from Crimea’s three main air bases, Russian jets this month flew 200 miles north and pounded Ukraine’s biggest seaports, in the Odessa region.A helicopter drops water to stop a fire on the bridge connecting the Russian mainland and the Crimean peninsula over the Kerch Strait, October 8, 2022. APIn recent days, Ukraine hit back, first hitting Crimean air defenses, then war jets on the ground. “The Ukrainians’ relentless attacks on Russian air defenses in Crimea — radars, fixed missiles batteries and mobile missile and gun vehicles — have rendered the air bases on the peninsula extremely vulnerable to follow-on drone raids,” American war blogger David Axe wrote Sunday. “Those follow-on raids are effectively scraping Russian air power from Crimea.”Having shredded one of the world’s densest air defences, Ukraine changed tactics — from hitting jets protected by steel-reinforced berms to hitting them on the tarmac. Mr. Axe wrote in his blog, Trench Art: “The Ukrainians are targeting Russian warplanes when they’ve got pilots aboard and munitions underwing that are likely to cook off following a drone strike.”Over the last week, Ukrainian long range drones hit two Crimean air bases, destroying two fighter jets that were preparing to take off — a MiG-31 and a Su-27. This brought to five the number of supersonic war jets bombed on the ground in Crimea over the last three weeks. Separately, at Lipetsk, about 150 northeast of Ukraine, saboteurs torched on Saturday night two Russian war jets that were parked at a Russian air base. Russian war bloggers expressed outraged to see videos of the attackers dropping Molotov cocktails in the cockpits of jets. The planes, an Su‑27 and an Su‑30, have a combined replacement value of $75 million. Ukraine’s State Security Service, or SBU, said that before acting their agents studied the routines of the base guards for two weeks.An Ilyushin Il-78 Midas air force tanker and a Tupolev Tu-95MS Bear strategic bomber in 2015 over Moscow. Host photo agency / RIA Novosti via Getty ImagesAs Ukraine radically increases production of long-range drones, attacks on far away Russian targets are expected to be a theme of 2026. This month, Ukrainian Sea Baby drones started hitting commercial oil tankers heading east through the Black Sea to pick up Russian oil at Novorossiysk and other ports.Then on Friday, Ukraine’s SBU announced that its drones had hit the Quendil, an empty tanker moving through the Mediterranean to a Russian port. The attack marks the first time that the nearly four-year-old war has spilled into the neutral waters of the Mediterranean. It is unclear if the drones flew 1,200 miles west from Ukraine, or were launched from a mother ship in the Mediterranean. The attack caused a fire, but no reported casualties. Opening up yet another front, Ukrainian drones attacked two Russian cargo ships and three Russian oil production platforms over the last two weeks in the Caspian Sea.These drone attacks are pushing up insurance costs for shippers and are pushing down the price of Russian oil. Yesterday, Bloomberg reported that the price of Russian Black Sea crude oil fell to $33 a barrel, well below the $61 a barrel fetched for Brent crude oil, the North Sea benchmark.An artist’s rendering from 1985 of a Soviet Tu-20 Bear-H aircraft launching a cruise missile. Via Wikimedia CommonsIn Crimea, Ukrainian drone attacks may force Russia’s Aerospace Force to retreat to the mainland. Already Saky air base, about 50 miles north of Sevastopol, has lost half of the complement of war jets it had at the start of the war.Russia’s air force will remain a formidable force: currently about 1,700 fixed wing planes. Yet this largely Soviet-era fleet faces an enemy as formidable as Ukrainian cruise missiles: metal fatigue.This problem was illustrated by a shocking home video last week of Russia’s last An-22 military transport breaking in two in the sky above Ivanovo, 150 miles northeast of Moscow. “By the time the war in Ukraine ends, between combat losses, wear and tear and aging of its already old aircraft fleet,” Czech analyst Jakub Janovsky predicted recently, Russia’s Aerospace Forces could “end up being down” about 40 percent “from its pre-war fleet of combat aircraft.”Mechanics can cannibalize older planes to keep newer ones flying. However, last year Ukrainian intelligence concluded that Russia needs 2,000 components imported from America and Europe to keep late model Sukhoi warjets flying. For now, Russia’s air force poses a lethal threat. Last night, 10 Tupolev strategic bombers, likely flying from Arctic bases, unleashed 38 missiles, hitting half of Ukraine’s 27 regions.Ukraine’s Air Force reported this morning that Russia also launched 635 Iranian-designed shahed drones. This pre-Christmas attack killed at least three people and shut down electricity in three regions near Poland. In a sign of a widening war, Poland scrambled war jets to shoot down any drones that might enter Polish airspace.

Ukraine, After Victory in Black Sea, Aims To Expel Russian Air Power From Crimea

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