Naval warfare poised to play smaller role in year 2 of Ukraine war US Navy officers predict

That assessment of the Ukrainian’s abilities is shared by one of the Navy’s top intelligence officers, Rear Adm. Mike Studeman, who said during the West 2023 conference that the “battle so far for the Black Sea… [is] largely over.”

“The A2AD, anti-access area denial, was achieved by the Ukrainians and therefore, you have a marginalization of the maritime activities,” said the commander of the Office of Naval Intelligence. “You have long-range fires that the Black Sea Fleet … will launch into Ukraine, but by and large there’s been a neutralization of many of the capabilities here that the Russians had intended to use” against Ukraine.

Studeman added that the long-term effect may be that whenever Russia decides to rebuild its land and air forces, it may be forced to rely more heavily on its navy — which would have implications both for Russia’s strategy on a global scale, and for wear and tear on its fleets.

Gilday and Studeman’s positions give them access to intelligence about the war that is not in the public domain. But in interviews with Breaking Defense, various national security analysts came to similar conclusions as the flag officers — albeit not always for the same reasons.

“The Russian navy has been left to, basically, just firing occasional precision guided missiles at energy infrastructure and that sort of thing in Ukraine,” said Dmitry Gorenburg, a senior researcher at CNA, a federally-funded research and development agency that provides advice to the Pentagon.

“The problem with that is that there’s a limited mound of those missiles left in Russia’s arsenal, so even that side is somewhat less significant than maybe it was a few months ago,” he added.

Sebastian Bruns, a researcher at the Institute for Security Policy at Kiel University and formerly a visiting professor at the US Naval Academy, echoed Studeman’s notion that the Russian navy may end picking up the slack later given how worn down the country’s army has become.

“The Russian navy could emerge as the branch that is most unscathed, and provide reserves anywhere from the frontlines to creating headaches for the West for years to come, in and around Europe, and elsewhere,” he said.

But Bruns also said “there is a real probability that the naval and maritime matters will gain in importance” over the coming year, citing requests by Andriy Melnyk, Ukraine’s deputy minister for foreign affairs, for Germany to send submarines to help stave off Russia’s Black Sea Fleet.