Russian Navy

• 1. Introduction

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  The Russian Navy's most embarrassing moment in modern memory came on the 14th of April 2022, when the cruiser Moskva, flagship of its Black Sea Fleet, slipped beneath the waves after a fire forced the crew to abandon ship. Ukrainian forces claimed to have struck it with Neptune anti-ship missiles. Russia never confirmed that account. The sinking was, by any measure, the most significant Russian naval loss in action since the Second World War.

  The navy that lost Moskva has existed in some form since 1696, born under a tsar who believed Russia's future lay at sea. It built its way to superpower status during the Cold War, then watched that fleet rust and shrink when the Soviet Union collapsed. Now it faces something no navy planner had fully anticipated: an adversary without a navy of its own, fighting back with drones and missiles, and winning. How did Russia build, lose, and partially rebuild its great navy? And where does it stand today?

• 2. Peter's Legacy

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  Peter the Great established the Imperial Russian Navy in October 1696, and from the beginning, he made the institution his own project. The St. Andrew's ensign, which still flies on Russian warships, and most of the navy's core traditions were established personally by Peter I. The Naval Infantry traces its origins to 1705, when Peter issued a decree for an infantry regiment "of naval equipage."

  Three centuries later, the navy's headquarters sits once again in The Admiralty in Saint Petersburg, the historic location of its Imperial predecessor. The Navy Staff relocated there in November 2012, a deliberate return to origins after years of uncertainty about where Russian seapower should root itself. The Baltic Fleet, the oldest continuously active fleet, was established on the 18th of May 1703, just two years before Peter's marine decree, making it one of the foundational institutions of Russian military history.

• 3. The Soviet Inheritance

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  By the mid-1980s the Soviet Navy had accumulated nearly 250 different classes of ship, a sprawling and often impractical range of vessel types that the military-industrial complex had pushed on the fleet over decades. Admiral Sergey Gorshkov had driven an enormous Cold War buildup, but had also kept ships in service well beyond their effective lifetimes, which made some degree of post-Soviet reduction unavoidable. Naval Aviation, at its Soviet peak, operated an estimated 60,000 personnel with some 1,100 combat aircraft.

  By 2006, those numbers had fallen to 35,000 personnel with around 270 combat aircraft. In 2002, out of 584 naval aviation crews, only 156 were judged combat ready, and just 77 were ready for night flying. Average annual flying time had dropped to 21.7 hours, compared to 24 hours in 1999. The Kiev-class aircraft carrying cruisers were prematurely retired. The incomplete second Admiral Kuznetsov-class carrier, named Varyag, was sold to China by Ukraine. A submarine of the Akula class, named Nerpa, was still under construction in 2003 after fifteen years on the ways.

• 4. Collapse and Kursk

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  In 1995, only two missile submarines at a time were being maintained on active patrol station, drawn from the combined Northern and Pacific Fleets. Decommissioned nuclear submarines piled up in ports near Murmansk, their storage presenting a significant environmental and safety concern. The Bellona Foundation reported on lowered readiness across those facilities. Naval support bases outside Russia were gradually closed, including Cam Ranh Bay in Vietnam, with only the modest logistics facility at Tartus, Syria kept open to support Mediterranean deployments.

  The decline reached a brutal public low point when the Oscar II-class submarine Kursk was lost during the Northern Fleet summer exercise, an event that was intended, with grim irony, to accompany the publication of a new naval doctrine. The disaster exposed not just the physical deterioration of the fleet but the institutional failures in training, maintenance, and crisis response that had accumulated throughout the post-Soviet decade. As of February 2008, the navy had 44 nuclear submarines, of which only 24 were operational, and 56 first and second rank surface combatants, of which 37 were operational.

• 5. The Rebuilding Decade

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  In 2013, rising gas and oil prices gave the Russian government the fiscal room to begin reversing the navy's decline. President Vladimir Putin had announced in 2012 an ambitious plan to build 51 modern ships and 24 submarines by 2020, with 16 of those submarines to be nuclear-powered. On the 10th of January 2013, the Russian Navy accepted its first new Borei-class ballistic missile submarine into service. A second Borei, named Aleksandr Nevskiy, completed sea trials and entered service on the 21st of December 2013.

  Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu said in August 2014 that capabilities would be bolstered with new weapons and equipment within the following six years, citing NATO enlargement and the opening stages of the Russo-Ukrainian War as the drivers. The surface fleet modernization focused on new classes of corvette, offshore patrol vessel, and frigate, principally the Admiral Gorshkov class, which represented the navy's first attempt to return to building large blue-water capable vessels since the Soviet collapse. The Steregushchiy-class corvette, whose lead ship was laid down on the 21st of December 2001, had been the first new surface construction since that collapse. By early 2025, eight Borei-class submarines were in service, along with five nuclear attack and cruise missile submarines, with more vessels of those classes still under construction.

• 6. The Black Sea War

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  The Russian navy entered the 2022 invasion of Ukraine with the Black Sea Fleet as its most active and politically visible arm. At the very start of the war, Ukrainian defenders on Snake Island told the approaching Moskva, flagship of the fleet, to go to hell before being captured. Moskva sank on the 14th of April 2022. In December 2023, the landing ship Novocherkassk was destroyed by Ukrainian cruise missiles.

  On the 31st of January 2024, Ukrainian sea drones struck and sank the Tarantul-class corvette Ivanovets in the Black Sea. Two weeks later, on the 14th of February, the same type of drone sank the landing ship Tsezar Kunikov. On the 5th of March, the patrol boat Sergei Kotov was also lost to drones. The tally, while imprecise, includes at least four major warships, three major amphibious ships, and one submarine, Rostov-na-Donu, either seriously damaged or destroyed in dry dock. Russia's only aircraft carrier, Admiral Kuznetsov, inactive since 2017, had its crew of approximately 1,500 reassigned to the Russian Army for ground combat duty in Ukraine, a sign that no near-term return to carrier operations was anticipated. By early 2026, Ukrainian drone capabilities had effectively pushed what remained of the Black Sea Fleet from open water into port.

• 7. Structure and Reach

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  The Russian Navy is organized into four fleets and one flotilla, each subordinate to a different Military District. The Northern Fleet, dating to 1733 but established as a modern formation in 1933, is headquartered at Severomorsk and is considered the main fleet. The Pacific Fleet traces its lineage to the Okhotsk Military Flotilla of 1731 and is headquartered in Vladivostok. The Caspian Flotilla, established on the 4th of November 1722, operates from Astrakhan and Makhachkala.

  In 2024, amid tensions arising from Sweden and Finland joining NATO, both the Northern and Baltic Fleets were subordinated to the Leningrad Military District, which became responsible for all Russian forces from Kaliningrad to the Arctic Ocean. The navy's Mediterranean presence has depended heavily on the Tartus facility in Syria, which Russia leased beginning in 1971 after losing access to bases in Albania, Yugoslavia, and Egypt. A 2017 agreement with Syria extended that arrangement for 49 years. As of mid-2025, the fall of the Assad regime in late 2024 had disrupted regular use of Tartus, and Russia was reportedly exploring ports in Libya and Algeria as more consistent alternatives.

• 8. Naval Infantry and Coastal Forces

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  The Naval Infantry earned the nickname "The Black Death" from German forces during the Second World War, for the combination of their black uniforms and the ferocity of their combat performance in the Black Sea and Baltic Sea regions. Since Peter the Great's 1705 decree, the marines have fought in the Napoleonic Wars, the Crimean War, the Russo-Japanese War, both World Wars, and the Chechen and Georgian conflicts. Their motto is: "Where We Are, There is Victory!"

  The Coastal Troops, which include both the Naval Infantry and the Coastal Missile and Artillery Troops, defend against enemy amphibious landings and maintain area-denial capabilities along Russia's geographically complex coastlines. Their arsenal includes the K-300P Bastion-P supersonic anti-ship cruise missile, the 3M-54 Kalibr subsonic cruise missile, and the A-222E Bereg-E 130mm mobile coastal artillery system. The Deputy Commander for Naval Infantry as of the available record is Lieutenant General Aleksandr Kolpatsenko. As of 2022, there were plans to expand naval infantry brigades into division-sized formations, though full implementation was linked to the conclusion of the war in Ukraine.