Beleaguered Russian Navy Gets New Commander

A reshuffle of the Russian Navy's top brass following heavy losses of its Black Sea Fleet vessels has been confirmed by Moscow.

Before the Russian Defense Ministry had issued a statement, state newspaper Izvestia reported on March 10 that Vladimir Putin had fired his Navy's commander-in-chief Admiral Nikolai Yevmenov, who had held the post since May 2019.

St. Petersburg news outlet Fontanka said Yevmenov would be replaced by Admiral Alexander Moiseev, who has overseen expansion of the Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol, which he took charge of in 2018. In May 2019, he was appointed commander of the Northern Fleet.

State news agencies RIA Novosti and TASS reported Tuesday that Moiseev had been appointed acting commander-in-chief of the Russian Navy and was unveiled at a ceremony in Kronstadt, 19 miles west of St. Petersburg.

Moiseev received the title of Hero of Russia in 2011 for successful missile launches from a strategic submarine.

No official reason has been given for his appointment, but there have been major losses for the Black Sea Fleet over the course of Moscow's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Newsweek has contacted the Russian Defense Ministry for comment.

Repeated strikes by Kyiv's forces on the fleet has caused the loss of around 30 percent of its vessels, according to the Hudson Institute think tank, which estimated that half of the fleet will be eliminated by 2025.

"The previous commander was removed from his position after the Russian Black Sea Fleet lost almost a third of its combat power since the beginning of the full-scale invasion," posted Ukrainian internal affairs adviser Anton Gerashchenko on X, formerly Twitter, next to an image of the new naval commander-in-chief.

"Just in the past month, it has lost two ships," Gerashchenko added, "in total, over two years of full-scale war, Russia lost more than 20 ships, including landing ships, submarines and the flagship cruiser Moskva," which was sunk in April 2022.

Last month, naval drones destroyed the missile-armed corvette Ivanovets and attacked Russian landing ships, including the Caesar Kunikov, near the southern Crimean city of Alupka, southeast of Sevastopol.

On March 5, the Black Sea Fleet patrol ship Sergey Kotov was hit and destroyed in an overnight attack claimed by Ukraine's military intelligence agency.

Other high-profile strikes in recent months included one in in September 2023, when Kyiv targeted the Ropucha-class Minsk with cruise missiles, while, in December, Kyiv said it had destroyed the Novocherkassk landing ship in the eastern Crimean port of Feodosia.

Atesh, a Ukrainian partisan movement, said this month that Russia has been forced to transport ship engines from occupied Crimea to a naval base in Novorossiysk, in Russia's Krasnodar region.