Russian Ships' 'Very Strange' Black Sea Maneuver Raises Questions

Russian ships appear to be acting with more caution in the Black Sea after a series of Ukraine marine drone attacks decimated Putin's navy in the region.

In a recent "interesting incident," a group of Russian vessels appeared to approach the Bosporus Strait before unexpectedly turning around instead of crossing to Russian-held Crimea, according to a Ukraine Navy spokesman.

The Black Sea Fleet has been targeted by Ukraine throughout the war as it seeks to reverse Russian President Vladimir Putin's 2014 annexation of Crimea. The region serves as Moscow's central logistics hub for its forces in southern Ukraine, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has pledged to recapture the peninsula.

"Recently, an interesting incident occurred when they sent two ship units to escort their vessels from the Bosporus. That doesn't happen often, only about once a month. But at some point, they just turned around and headed back," Dmytro Pletenchuk, the Ukraine Navy spokesman, said on Ukrainian television, according to Ukrainian news agency Unian.

While it was unclear what the motive for the U-turn was, Pletenchuk speculated that the ships' commanders may have been tipped off about a "threat," noting that it represented a "positive tendency" for Ukraine.

"These vessels were forced to move along the Turkish border, in effect hiding out in Turkish territorial waters. Thus not taking the shortest route, which they would normally take, but instead fleeing to their hiding spots," the spokesperson added.

Newsweek reached out to the Russian Defense Ministry for comment via email.

While Pletenchuk did not identify the specific ships in question, OSINT analysts recently spotted a number of such occurrences in the Black Sea involving the Russian fleet, including those under U.S. sanctions.

"Very very strange: Civilian vessel in name only,@USTreasury," wrote Yörük Işık, a Bosphorus OSINT observer on X, formerly Twitter. "Sanctioned SC South owned Russian flag cargo vessel Sparta IV, comes all the way to the southern entrance of Bosporus, about to transit, traffic gets suspended due to fog. Sparta IV turns around & is heading to Aegean," the analyst noted.

Işık said in a subsequent X post: "Russian tanker Yaz which usually transports aviation fuel from occupied Feodosia's unlawfully seized oil terminal to Russian Air Force operating in Syria also makes the mysterious u-turn after arriving all the way to Bosphorus. Fake civilian vessels not daring to sail the BlackSea?"

A recent assessment by the British Defense Ministry found that Russia's tactics against Ukraine's creative warfare in the Black Sea were falling short.

Russia can still strike at Ukraine from the eastern parts of the Black Sea, but it is "increasingly evident that the defensive posture adopted to mitigate against Ukraine's non-conventional approach to maritime warfare is not working as intended," the MOD said in February.

The Institute for the Study of War, a United States-based think tank, similarly assessed in December that Ukraine's success in striking Black Sea Fleet vessels has forced the navy to shift its operating patterns.

This is causing the Black Sea Fleet to move some ships away from its main base in Sevastopol, Crimea, and is "hampering the fleet's ability to interfere with maritime trade in the western part of the Black Sea," the think tank said.

Ukraine does not have a large navy but has made impressive use of naval drones to carry out dramatic strikes on Russia's Black Sea assets that have proved deeply embarrassing to Moscow, leading to losses of several landing ships, Tarantul-class corvettes, a submarine, and Russia's flagship, Moskva.

The Ukrainian Armed Forces Center for Strategic Communications (StratCom) said Kyiv's forces had "disabled" about 33 percent of the Back Sea Fleet's warships by February 6.

Pletenchuk also said Friday that Russia's Black Sea Fleet is now "limited" in its actions. "There is not much activity," he said.

Russia's Black Sea operations have been "greatly complicated, if not paralyzed," by the nearly two years of all-out war between Moscow and Kyiv, Ukraine's navy said in early February.

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Update 3/1/24, 8:30 a.m. ET: This article was updated with additional information.