Russian Kilo-class submarine photographed in the English Channel, off the coast of the United Kingdom
Kiev guarantees that a new submarine drone damaged a Russian Kilo-class submarine at the Novorossiysk base beyond repair, opening a new chapter in the naval war between the two countries.
Underwater drones attacked a submarine for the first time in history, marking a milestone in the evolution of naval warfare and opening another chapter in a future dominated by unmanned units.
According to Kiev intelligence services, the new underwater drones Sub Sea Babyfrom the Ukrainian Navy, hit and disabled a state-of-the-art Russian Kilo-class submarine at the Novorossiysk base in the Black Sea.
The vessel. with a cost estimated at more than 340 million euroswas destroyed by a kamikaze drone whose cost did not exceed 10 thousand euros, highlights the .
The attack, conducted by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), and which the Russians deny, despite the video released by Kiev, left the Russian Navy submarine out of servicecausing vital damage to the stern of the ship, rendering it unusable.
This submarine is capable of transporting Kalibr cruise missilesa key element in the terror campaign against the Ukrainian civilian population, orchestrated by the Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.
According to analysts, this operationIt’s not just historical: also represents a relevant turning point in the naval conflict between Ukraine and Russia, with consequences in the Mediterranean theater and beyond.
The technical details of the operation, analyzed by naval defense experts, indicate that Ukraine used an unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV), called “Sub Sea Baby”.
Unlike surface drones, which navigate like speedboats, this device can remain submerged in the final phase of approachfunctioning, in practice, as a autonomous long range torpedo.
That immersion capacity was decisive to bypass the defenses of the port of Novorossiysk, designed mainly with floating pontoons to block the passage of surface vessels, but ineffective in the face of threats moving underwater.
Navigate inside a hostile naval base It’s a huge engineering challenge. The drone will have had to maneuver through confined spaces and execute several turns with precision to reach the submarine dock, located at the furthest point of the dock.
Analysts suggest that the device was guided by waypoints (waypoints) to the vicinity of the target, at which point its autonomous systems took control for the final attack.
The video released by the SBU shows a massive explosion at the stern of the submarine, a critical area where the propulsion and immersion planes are located — which guarantees that the ship will remain inoperative for a long periodeven if it doesn’t sink completely.
The strategic framework of this attack is part of a new escalation of the economic and infrastructure war in the Black Sea. In previous weeks, Ukraine had intensified operations against the “shadow fleet” of Russian oil tankers, disabling vessels such as the Virat, the Kiaros and the Dashan, with the aim of stopping crude smuggling.
Russia responded bombing commercial ships in the port of Odessa, including the Turkish ferry Cenk Tloaded with food.
The submarine strike in Novorossiysk is interpreted as a calculated retaliation: eliminate a missile launch platform Kalibr that threatened the Ukrainian energy infrastructure.
The impact on the Russian Black Sea Fleet is devastatingboth in terms of numbers and morale. With this attack, Russia sees its operational submarine force in the region reduced to just two unitsof the original six.
Remember that another submarine of the same classthe Rostov-on-Don, was destroyed in September 2023, when it was in dry dock in Sevastopol.
The loss of these units not only weakens the naval blockade against Ukraine, as it erodes, in the long term, the power projection ability from Moscow in the Mediterranean, where these submarines used to patrol as instruments of deterrence.
A disturbing aspect exposed by the attack is the penetration ability of Ukrainian intelligence into Russian surveillance systems.
The video of the impact appears to originate from a security camera at the port itselfwhich suggests that the SBU managed to hack the naval base’s closed-circuit television to monitor enemy activity in real time.
The images show warships marked with green boxesindicating the use of artificial intelligence algorithms to identify targets — a capability that raises serious doubts about operational security of the most protected Russian military installations.
A vulnerability exposed in Novorossiysk forces the Russian fleet to rethink, once again, its device. If your main base on the eastern Black Sea coast is no longer secure, your options become even more distant ports and worse equipped, like Sochi or Poti, in Abkhazia.
However, these locations lack the necessary infrastructure to sustain continuous combat operations, which, in practice, could leave the Black Sea Fleet “lame” and functionally ineffective in influencing the course of the war.
