Captain Oleksandr put his hand on the throttle and nudged it forward. His patrol boat roared into action and zipped through the waves. Behind him was the Ukrainian port of Odesa. In front – beyond a grey expanse of water, and 180km (112 miles) away, was occupied Crimea. “We’re here to stop the Russians from taking the Black Sea,” Oleksandr said, as his boat – travelling at a nippy 30 knots – rolled up and down.
In 2014 Ukraine lost three-quarters of its modest naval assets when Vladimir Putin seized the Crimean peninsula. Then, in 2022, Russia sank most of what was left. Its own fleet, by contrast, seemed invincible. It included a mighty flagship carrier, the Moskva, two modern frigates, several smaller warships and multiple missile boats and landing vessels, as well as four submarines carrying deadly Kalibr missiles.
The Moskva entered into legend when it told the Ukrainian garrison on Snake Island in the Black Sea to surrender, on day one of Putin’s invasion. The radio operator responded: “Russian warship, go fuck yourself”. The Russians stormed the island anyway and took the Ukrainian soldiers guarding it prisoner. Since then, though, Moscow has suffered a series of maritime setbacks.
First, Ukraine sank the Moskva using a Neptune cruise missile. Then it reclaimed Snake Island. After that, Kyiv’s homemade explosives carrying sea drones sent at least five other Russian boats to the bottom of the sea. In 2023 and 2024 Moscow’s Black Sea fleet relocated. Surviving ships left their base in the Crimean harbour of Sevastopol and sailed east, to the Russian port of Novorossiysk.
The fleet’s departure allowed commercial shipping to resume fully from three coastal cities: Odesa, Chornomorsk and Pivdennyi (formerly Yuzhnyi). The future of the Black Sea is likely to form part of any peace deal with Russia. Last week, after his unhappy meeting with Donald Trump and JD Vance in the Oval Office, Volodymyr Zelenskyy proposed a truce. It could begin on land and sea, he said.
Spelling out the details on Friday, he called for “no military operations” in the Black Sea, and an end to missile and drone attacks on energy and civilian infrastructure. Ukraine’s president will travel on Monday to Saudi Arabia to meet the crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, and to hold talks on Tuesday with US negotiators. It is unclear if genuine progress to ending the war can be made.
For now, Russia continues to pummel Ukraine from Crimea. Whenever the air raid siren sounds, the patrol boat takes to the waves and tries to shoot down incoming drones. “They arrive in a swarm. Normally there are 20. We manage to destroy around half,” the chief officer, Illia, said. He added: “You hit one and immediately fire at the next. There’s no time for celebration.”
Last week Russian unmanned aerial vehicles targeted the Odesa region, flying over the sea in darkness. On Thursday an elderly man was killed, and another person wounded. Twenty houses were damaged. Air defence units shot down three dozen drones, but were unable to intercept them all. There were more attacks on Friday, on the Odesa suburb of Podilskyi and an outlying village.
The patrol boat is equipped with three machine guns. One is an American mini-gun that fires 6,000 rounds a minute. The others are a Browning and an ancient PKM, produced in the Soviet Union in 1982. “It’s a pretty cool gunboat,” Illia said, as his crew sailed past container ships, several wrecks and an island of gulls and diving shags.
Foreign partners have helped to restore Ukraine’s navy. It now has 90 vessels. Estonia donated Illia’s vessel. Sweden and Finland have provided combat boats. The UK passed on two former Royal Navy mine-hunters, currently moored in Portsmouth. Under the Montreux convention, they can only enter the Black Sea once the war ends. Kyiv has built a new corvette in Istanbul, with another on the way.
Oleksii Neizhpapa, the commander of Ukraine’s navy, said his country had “independently freed” the north-west Black Sea. Russia’s fleet fled because it no longer felt safe, he said, and Ukraine also had “fire control” over the neighbouring Sea of Azov. His strategic goal was to guarantee the safety of the busy grain corridor used by international cargo ships to take goods to foreign ports. Exports had almost returned to pre-2022 levels, he said, with 90m tonnes transported. “This is good for the economy. It’s one of the successes of Ukraine’s war against Russia,” he said.
“The corridor works all the time. We’ve destroyed 100 floating mines. It’s a big operation, which nobody talks about and nobody really sees. Our task is to guarantee safe passage,” he said.
Speaking to the Observer, Neizhpapa described the war with Russia as a technological race dominated by drones. Moscow had developed “pretty effective” methods to counter sea drone raids. So Ukraine had responded by turning the drones into fast-moving attack platforms. Engineers had added anti-aircraft guns to shoot down helicopters – and FPV (first-person view) drones, he said.
The vice admiral said he was optimistic Kyiv would be able to destroy the Kerch bridge, built by Russia to connect its territory with Crimea. Two previous strikes damaged the road and rail structure. Russia’s military was no longer able to transport heavy wagons across the railway bridge, Neizhpapa said. “The Russians understand we are actively discussing a third operation. There is a saying: ‘God loves a trinity’,” he said, grinning.
Neizhpapa shrugged off tensions with the Trump administration, which has cut supplies of weapons and intelligence. “We can’t split from the US,” he said. “We are in a new epoch of war between democratic countries and authoritarian ones. We are in the line of fire from totalitarian states.” Western support for Ukraine sent a powerful signal that “we are not alone,” he noted, saying: “It inhibits bad Russian behaviour”
The commander was speaking from his office in Odesa, decorated with naval memorabilia. One souvenir is a part of the missile used to sink the Moskva. The shield-like piece of casing shows a Ukrainian soldier giving the middle finger to the burning ship. “I stood on the Moskva’s deck in 2012. Ten years later we sank it,” Neizhpapa said, pointing out it was the first Russian flagship to be lost since 1905.
The Kremlin says the Black Sea region is a part of “historical” Russia. In fact, it was previously home to Greeks, Scythians and for four centuries the Ottomans, until the late 18th century, when Catherine the Great seized it. Neizhpapa said the Russians twisted history and understood nothing of the actual past. “When Kyiv had a university Moscow was just a bog. It was home to a lot of croaking frogs,” he said.
Back on the gunboat, the sailors acknowledged that after three years of all-out war they were exhausted. But they were not ready to sign a peace deal that involved Ukraine giving four oblasts to Russia – one of many Kremlin demands, alongside replacement of Zelenskyy’s government and non-Nato “neutrality”.
There was also bewilderment at Trump’s support for Moscow. “Russia already gets help from North Korea and Iran. Day by day they conquer our territory. We struggle, but we do our best,” one sailor, Volodymyr, said. “Now with such a political situation, such political decisions, we don’t understand.” If Zelenskyy capitulated Ukraine would erupt in civil war, he predicted.
“The Russians try and kill us every day. They drop bombs on women and children,” Oleksandr said. “This is a struggle of good against evil. We are counting on the world to help us. If you don’t understand what’s happening come here and we will take you on an excursion.”
Luke Harding’s Invasion: Russia’s Bloody War and Ukraine’s Fight for Survival, shortlisted for the Orwell Prize, is published by Guardian Faber
