The commander of the Hetman Sahaidachny gave the order to flood his own ship. The frigate was Ukraine’s flagship, its single largest warship, and it was sitting in a shipyard at Mykolaiv in early March 2022, mid-repair and unable to move, as Russian columns pushed toward the city. Rather than let it be captured intact, the crew opened it to the sea. It settled into the harbor mud with a list to port.
That was, more or less, the Ukrainian navy. A handful of patrol boats, a scuttled flagship, no ability to contest the sea. Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, by contrast, had cruisers, frigates, corvettes, landing ships, submarines, and a fortified home at Sevastopol that the Russian and Soviet navies had held for two centuries. On paper the contest at sea was over before it began.
Two years later, that fleet was pulling its ships out of Crimea and running them more than 300 kilometers east to a Russian port, driven from a harbor it could no longer keep them safe in — by missiles, and by boats with no one aboard.
A weapon built from nothing
Ukraine’s answer to a fleet it could not match was to stop thinking about ships. In November 2022, the government announced a crowdfunding drive for unmanned surface vessels — drone boats — a hundred of them, at about $250,000 apiece, and the public paid for a dozen on the first day. The military intelligence directorate, the HUR, was meanwhile developing a boat of its own. That one, the Magura V5 — bought in part with the crowdfunded money — was put on display at a defense fair in Istanbul in late July 2023.
It was not much to look at. Eighteen feet long, low and dark in the water, built to sit almost invisible against the swell. It ran on batteries, made about 48 miles an hour flat out, and could travel some 500 miles before its charge ran down. In the nose it carried up to 660 pounds of explosive. Each one cost in the neighborhood of $273,000 — roughly the price of a modest house, aimed at warships worth tens of millions.
The other half of the fleet came from the security service, the SBU, which built its own drone boat and called it Sea Baby. The idea behind both was the same. You could not out-ship the Russians. You could swarm them. Send a pod of these things skimming across the Black Sea at night, steer them by video link from hundreds of miles away, and drive them into a hull at full speed.
The first kill
The proof came in the small hours of February 1, 2024, off the western coast of Crimea near a village called Okunevka.
The target was the Ivanovets, a Tarantul-class missile corvette — a fast, heavily armed Soviet-era warship built to kill other ships, lying in the roadstead off the mouth of Lake Donuzlav. A pack of Magura drones, run by an HUR special unit called Group 13, found it in the dark and closed in. Video released afterward showed the boats bearing down on the corvette, the corvette’s guns firing into the water trying to hit targets barely a foot above the surface, and then the flashes as the drones struck the hull one after another. The first hit the stern; the ones behind it tore a gaping hole amidships. The Ivanovets settled by the stern and went down. Ukraine put the loss at 60 to 70 million dollars.
Drone boats had put small landing craft on the bottom before — two of them at Chornomorske the previous November. But they had never sunk a warship. The Ivanovets was the first.
Thirteen days later the same unit did it to something much bigger. On February 14, off the resort town of Alupka, a swarm of Magura drones struck the Tsezar Kunikov, a Ropucha-class landing ship displacing more than 4,000 tons fully loaded — a vessel built to carry tanks and troops onto a beach. The HUR reported that it took a critical breach on its port side and began to sink. Accounts of the crew diverged sharply: Ukraine said most of the 87 it counted aboard did not survive, while a former sailor told the BBC that all 89 got off. Moscow’s defense ministry never acknowledged the ship at all, announcing only that it had downed six drones over the Black Sea that night. The loss was confirmed instead by Russian military bloggers.
On March 5, the patrol ship Sergey Kotov — newer, and worth around 65 million dollars — went the same way near the Kerch Strait, hit by Magura V5s.
The fleet that ran
The drone boats were never the whole story. Ukraine had already sunk the fleet’s flagship, the cruiser Moskva, back in April 2022 with two homemade Neptune missiles — the largest Russian warship sunk in combat since the Second World War. British Storm Shadow cruise missiles later tore open a submarine and a landing ship sitting in dry dock at Sevastopol. The strikes came from every direction at once: missiles, drones, sabotage.
But it was the drone boats that changed the arithmetic. A cruise missile is expensive and finite. A drone boat costs a fraction of what it destroys, and Ukraine could build them faster than Russia could replace warships that took years and a shipyard to lay down. Every corvette on the bottom was a permanent subtraction; every drone lost was a Tuesday.
Russia had already seen enough, and it was the missiles that finally moved it. Nine days after the dry-dock strike, another salvo tore open the fleet headquarters itself. By the first days of October 2023, satellite imagery showed the most valuable ships gone from Sevastopol — the base the navy had held since Catherine the Great — pulled east to Novorossiysk, a Russian port on the far side of the sea, and to Feodosia. British defense intelligence read the move plainly: the fleet was relocating in the face of threats to Sevastopol. The drone boats had been part of what made the harbor untenable — a swarm of them had gotten into Sevastopol Bay itself back in October 2022 and damaged a minesweeper, with Ukraine claiming a hit on a frigate too — but the sinkings that would define them were still four months away. What the boats did was make going back unthinkable. The headquarters of the Black Sea Fleet, in the end, was a place the fleet no longer wanted to be.
The pressure had reached the shipping lanes even earlier. Russia had quit the grain deal that July, declared the northwestern Black Sea unsafe for navigation, and warned that any ship bound for a Ukrainian port would be treated as a potential carrier of military cargo. A month later Ukraine opened a corridor of its own anyway, running ships down its own coast and along Romanian and Bulgarian waters. The first one out, a container ship that had sat in Odesa since the week of the invasion, sailed on August 16. In its first four months the corridor moved some ten million tonnes of cargo. The blockade held only as long as the fleet could enforce it, and the fleet was busy staying alive.
By March 2024, Ukraine’s navy was claiming roughly a third of the warships Russia had kept in the Black Sea before the war had been destroyed or disabled — a claim no independent count confirmed, though British defense intelligence tallied at least 26 vessels damaged or destroyed by that summer.
A country that had drowned its own flagship to keep it from the enemy had, within two years, driven that enemy’s fleet out of the sea’s western half and out of its own two-century home port — without a navy, and in the end without anyone aboard.