A nation with effectively no navy in 2022 has, by 2026, functionally evicted the Russian Black Sea Fleet from its historic base — using five-and-a-half-metre uncrewed boats built on fishing-vessel hulls.
Ukraine's intelligence services — the SBU and the military intelligence directorate — used the Sea Baby and Magura V5 uncrewed surface vessels to sink the Russian corvette Ivanovets and the landing ship Tsezar Kunikov in early 2024. The boats are barely larger than a jet-ski and cost between two hundred and fifty thousand and three hundred thousand dollars to build. The vessels they killed cost a thousand times more.
By the autumn of 2025, the upgraded Sea Baby had a fifteen-hundred-kilometre range and a two-thousand-kilogram payload. Variants carry rockets; others carry machine-gun turrets. In May of 2025 a Magura V7 armed with AIM-9 Sidewinder air-to-air missiles shot down two Russian Su-30 fighter jets — the first time in history an uncrewed surface vessel has destroyed manned combat aircraft.
Roughly eleven Russian warships have been damaged or destroyed by Ukrainian naval drones. The cumulative effect: Russia has abandoned Sevastopol — its historic naval base in Crimea — and relocated the operational core of its Black Sea Fleet to Novorossiysk on the Russian mainland. A two-hundred-and-thirty-year-old strategic position, given up to a fleet of plywood boats.
On the fifteenth of December, 2025, the SBU unveiled the Sub Sea Baby — an uncrewed underwater vehicle — and struck a Project 636.3 Improved Kilo-class submarine moored at Novorossiysk. The United Kingdom Ministry of Defence assessed the submarine likely seriously damaged. Russia denies damage; the SBU and Western analysts call it the first combat kill of a submarine by an unmanned underwater vehicle in history. With four Kilo-class boats remaining in the Black Sea, Russia's Kalibr cruise-missile launch capacity is materially degraded.
The Black Sea lesson — that no anchorage is far enough — reached a second sea on the third of June, 2026. Hours before Vladimir Putin opened the St Petersburg economic forum, Ukrainian long-range drones struck the outskirts of Russia's second city: an oil terminal, and the naval base at Kronstadt on the Gulf of Finland, the main outpost of the Baltic Fleet, far beyond any front line. Russian air defences claimed fifty-nine drones downed across three districts, with no one killed; Pulkovo airport closed and the mobile network went dark. Robert Brovdi, who commands Ukraine's unmanned systems, reported the corvette Boikiy struck — though only unverified video supports the claim, and Moscow has not confirmed it. The deep-strike campaign that emptied Sevastopol now arrives at the Baltic Fleet's home pier.