September 7, 2026: On July 27th, the Russian Navy celebrated its 330th anniversary. They celebrated only on land, without ships; passing dignitaries assembled on a grandstand due to fear of Ukrainian drone attacks. This was the second year this happened, and as long as the war in Ukraine continues, there will be no traditional Navy Day festivities. A similar celebration was canceled in St Petersburg, southeast of the Northern Fleet base near the Kola Peninsula.

Russia is losing its war with Ukraine, and that can be seen in the number of sailors and naval infantrymen who have died in Ukraine or as a result of drone attacks on the naval bases. Nearly 20,000 sailors and naval infantrymen have been sent to Ukraine, with a third of them killed or wounded. At least a thousand have died so far, and the continuing drone attacks will increase the losses.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022, the Ukrainians, who lack any warships at all, have destroyed twenty Russian Navy ships. These include warships and support vessels like landing ships. Ukraine has used long-range missiles and USVs (Unmanned Surface Vessels) to attack Russian ships, forcing the survivors to distant ports in the far northeastern portions of the Black Sea. Even though these ports are a thousand kilometers from Crimea, the Ukrainians can still reach them with USVs, despite the risks of some USVs being lost due to equipment failure on the long journey or attacks by Russian weapons when they reach the distant Russian ports.

Ukraine wants to control who has warships in the Black Sea so they can protect the vital grain exports from Ukrainian ports. The main port is Odesa, Ukraine's largest port. The only problem Odesa has is Russian naval mines that are still floating around the Western Black Sea. These mines were deployed in early 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine. The Russians expected the Ukrainian resistance to be brief and ineffective. The Ukrainians put up a more effective defense than Russia expected, and now Russian forces are being forced out of Ukraine and are unable to do anything about the mines they put into the Black Sea. Not only are the mines still out there, but many, if not most, of them are not tethered to a weight on the seabed and are floating free and are a danger to all ships. Russia has also declared that they will continue to put naval mines into the Black Sea. They can do this by bringing mines by truck to small ports along the Crimean coast and using small boats to take them out to sea, where they plant them with tethers.

Eventually, some of those mines either broke loose or were cut loose and drifted into shipping lanes used by Ukrainian and NATO ships. By early 2023, over 40 of these mines had been found and destroyed. It is unknown how many mines are still out there, but the NATO countries that border the Black Sea continue to look for them. Some of these mines were bottom mines, which, unlike floating mines, are kept in place by a chain attached to a weight on the seabed, but sometimes the chain breaks. There are also bottom mines that are placed on the seabed and don’t drift around. Russia does not appear to have used bottom mines in the Black Sea.

In mid-2023, the number of free-floating mines between Crimea and the narrow straits Turkey controls that lead to the Mediterranean and the world’s oceans increased suddenly. Turkey and other NATO nations control most of the Black Sea coastline, especially the southern and western Black Sea coasts. At that time, the Russian navy still controlled most of the eastern Black Sea and was believed responsible for more than 400 free-floating naval mines showing up west of Crimea since mid-2023.

Few of these mines appear to be tethered mines that broke loose from their chains. That is an old problem with Russian-made floating mines. Tethered mines are designed to have their weighted base sink to the bottom of shallow water, less than 20 meters deep. Most of the mines currently in the Black Sea were apparently released into the water without any tether. The use of naval mines is diminished because they are not much of a threat to warships, which are constantly on the lookout for them, and most commercial ships are too big to sink after encountering one of these mines. They may cause hull damage and flooding, but not enough to sink a ship. The damage is sufficient to require repairs because hull damage can worsen in rough weather and strong seas.

The mines posed an immediate danger to smaller commercial ships, especially fishing trawlers, as well as some large private vessels, such as yachts. Some NATO countries with Black Sea coastlines have organized a mine-clearing operation. Turkey, Romania, and Bulgaria contributed mine-clearing vessels and equipment. NATO members that do not border the Black Sea, but have a lot of commercial shipping operating in the Black Sea, tried to contribute mine-clearing ships and equipment, but the Turks, who control the only entrance to the Black Sea, refused to let them in.

The situation worsened because of a massive storm that ravaged the Black Sea coastline on November 26th and 27th, 2023. Such a storm has not occurred in the Black Sea for over a century, and the damage was extensive. Military facilities and coastal fortifications were damaged or destroyed. Ships at sea, especially smaller ones, were damaged or sunk. Some ships at sea ran ashore. The ten-meter-high waves were particularly damaging to Crimea's ports and coastal military facilities.

A less visible form of damage was the number of moored, by a chain to a weight on the sea bottom, naval mines. The powerful storm broke the chains and set many of these mines free. This added another hazard for commercial shipping in the Black Sea. Eventually, all these mines were eliminated as a threat to navigation.

While Ukraine has destroyed all the Russian warships in the Black Sea, there are still Russian naval mines in the water, and Russia is quietly putting more mines into the Black Sea to threaten Ukraine’s vital grain exports. The Russian attitude is, if we can’t have any ships in the Black Sea, we will do what we can to ensure that no one else does either. This is primarily aimed at Ukrainian grain exports. There was a problem in that the Russian mines are threatening shipping moving to ports of NATO members Bulgaria, Romania, and Turkey. These three nations agreed in 2014 to establish a joint mine-clearing force. Only mine-clearing ships from these three countries would be involved, and Turkey would not allow any additional mine-clearing ships into the Black Sea. Eventually, mine-clearing vessels focused on maintaining a mine-free corridor along the west shore of the Black Sea, allowing ships to travel safely to and from Odesa via ports in Romania and Bulgaria. This corridor extends from Odesa in Ukraine south along the 245-kilometer Romanian coastline, then the 278-kilometer Bulgarian coastline to the Turkish Straits and the exit to the Mediterranean.

The Russian Navy has long faced problems. Twenty years ago, Russia studied its navy and found that, because of the age of its ships and the lack of maintenance since the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991, the fleet would be reduced to sixty seaworthy warships and submarines in ten years. Because of its geography, the Russian navy is divided into four widely separated fleets (North, Pacific, Baltic and Black Sea). Assuming the fleet is divided equally into four parts, the Baltic Sea Fleet would be inferior to the nearby Swedish and Finnish fleets in a decade. The Black Sea fleet would be inferior to the nearby Turkish navy.

The study backs what the admirals have been saying since the late 1990s. Without a lot more money spent on ship construction, the mighty Russian fleet will soon disappear. Russian legislators were unwilling to buy the large submarines and warships the Soviet Union built. However, cheaper and smaller coastal defense ships are under construction. These include corvettes and patrol boats. Fortunately, this is a worldwide trend, and even the United States is moving in that direction. But some support still exists for nuclear submarines, which the Soviet Union spent hundreds of billions of dollars developing over the last half century. But building new nuclear boats is going to cost the Russians at least a billion dollars each. Russia has never had a great need for a powerful high-seas fleet, and has never done very well with the warships it did have. So getting the money to rebuild a large fleet will be a tough sell, and unlikely to succeed.