On Oct. 11, Russian military blogger Rybar reported that Ukraine had attacked and damaged the large Russian patrol ship Pavel Derzhavin. The attack reportedly damaged the ship’s rudder, preventing it from steering. A tug boat was sent out to rescue the Pavel Derzhavin, but soon after the two ships met, the tug was also attacked. The source of the attack was reportedly Ukrainian drone boats. The Ukrainian navy has confirmed the damage to the Pavel Derzhavin. Some reports have insisted that the ship has “exploded.”
This wasn’t the first such attack by Ukraine. At least one other Russian ship of the same Project 22160 Class, the Sergey Kotov, was reportedly damaged by Ukrainian aquatic drones on Sept. 14, possibly along with a third boat in this class. In October 2022, a reported nine-drone “fleet” attacked Russian ships at anchor near Sevastopol.
Just as with aerial drones, Ukraine has been rapidly developing, innovating, and building new generations of aquatic drones since the Russian invasion began. According to some reports, the Pavel Derzhavin was hit by one of Ukraine’s “Sea Baby” drones, such as the one used in an attack on the Kerch Bridge in September. But there was one feature of the attack that made it stand out. According to Russian sources, “the epicenter of the explosion was underwater.”
So, it seems, was the ship’s attacker.
What happened to the Pavel Derzhavin has an interesting precursor in U.S. history.
On the evening of Feb. 17, 1864, the 1,260-tonne sloop-of-war USS Housatonic was holding station in Charleston Harbor as part of a Union fleet blockading the Confederate Coast. Just after 9 PM, a Black recruit named Robert Flemming, who was stationed high up in the rigging, noticed something odd in the water about 100 meters from the ship and called out a warning. However, his concern was dismissed by a white officer who declared that Fleming had spotted only a log. Two minutes later, an explosion struck the ship on the starboard side. It sank quickly, settling down in 25 feet of water. Because of the shallow bay, only five men were lost in the explosion and subsequent sinking, but the Housatonic had just earned itself a spot in the history books as the first ship to be sunk by a submarine.
The submarine in question was the Confederate boat H. L. Hunley, and while it had just achieved something never before accomplished, within minutes of taking out the Housatonic, the Hunley also sank, killing all eight men on board. More people died on the first “successful” naval attack submarine than on the ship it attacked.
The Hunley, which was found in 1995, salvaged, and now sits in a small museum near the docks from which it launched, is now semi-famous—both for its single exploit and for the ridiculous level of danger it represented for the men on board. The crew that died on Feb. 17, 1864, was actually the second crew to be killed by the treacherous little boat. On Aug. 29, 1863, a bad control caused Hunley to dive with one hatch open. Five men died. On Oct. 15, 1863, the Hunley was practicing its attack maneuver in the harbor and simply failed to surface. Eight more men died in this second accident, including the sub’s designer and namesake. The Hunley made the OceanGate Titan seem like an exemplar of safety, but the Confederate navy just kept dragging the thing back to the surface and feeding it men.
What’s less well-known is that the Hunley wasn’t alone. In ports all over the South, men were struggling to build effective submarines. From the Texas coast to Mobile Bay to the rivers of Virginia (and sometimes at sites well away from the sea), Confederate sympathizers viewed the submarine as a miracle weapon: the one thing that could break the Union blockade. Ambitious designers even wrote about taking the war north to the harbors of Boston and New York, where their new devices would sink ships and make foreign merchants think twice about trading with the Union.
There were some in the Union who feared that all this might be possible. They had a name for these would-be submarine marauders and for the underwater mines that Conderates planted around their harbors. They called them “infernal machines.”
What happened to the Pavel Derzhavin near Sevastopol is far from a second coming of the Housatonic, and Ukraine is in no way like the Confederacy. Not only was the South dedicated to the idea of maintaining slavery and inequality, it also just … sucked. Especially as a place from which a new technology might develop. In fact, the South was technologically regressive expressly because it had built an economy around nearly free manual labor provided through chattel slavery. Had it been the Union who needed to develop submarines, you can bet your ass there would have been submarines.
Ukraine isn’t just a democratic nation fighting for its continued independence and individual liberty; it is also a hotbed of innovation with a long history of higher education and celebrated achievements. What it has done with both aerial and surface drones is astounding. In many ways, Ukraine has rewritten the rules for how an army should operate against a larger but more hidebound enemy. In particular, it has shown how inexpensive aerial drones can reshape the battlefield.
Now they’re taking a step that could impact how navies operate well beyond this war.
At the outset of the unprovoked invasion, there was a widespread fear that Russia’s Black Sea Fleet would so dominate the coasts of Ukraine that they might have free reign over all territory within kilometers. Cities like Odesa might be in serious danger—not because Russia had any skill at conducting a naval landing, but because those ships might make it impossible for the Ukrainian military to operate anywhere near the coast. Russia had a fleet. Ukraine really didn’t. And if navies are worth anything, surely that gave a big edge to Vladimir Putin.
That turned out to be just about 180 degrees from the truth. Ukraine took down the flagship of the Russian fleet barely a month after the invasion began. Since then, Russian ships have been sunk off the piers of Berdyansk, blasted in their main harbor at Sevastopol, and even blown up while in drydock for repairs. Both anti-ship missiles modified for launch from the shore and missiles designed for land targets repurposed to go after ships have been used successfully, as have a growing host of aerial drones that have proven capable of harassing Russian ships almost anywhere they dock.
Six hundred four days after the war’s onset, the Russian Black Sea Fleet has been battered by attacks and is currently down by a reported 20 surface vessels and one very expensive submarine. How many ships and boats are currently damaged isn’t clear, but it’s absolutely obvious that Russia’s remaining fleet is extremely restricted in the operations they can support. They’ve mainly been relegated to acting as floating platforms to launch Kalibr missiles into Ukrainian cities and a means of harassing grain carriers well away from the Ukrainian coast.
Earlier this month, the flagship of the Russian Black Sea Fleet was reportedly moved from Crimea to the Russian port of Novorossiysk, along with several other ships and three submarines, to keep them away from the constant barrage of Ukrainian attacks. A new amphibious carrier ship of the Ivan Rogov class was expected to take on the role of flagship last year, It’s still mysteriously absent.
All of this shows how effective Ukraine has been at not just nullifying what was supposed to be a huge Russian advantage, but also turning it into a resource sink for Russia.
There may not always be a concentration of Russian vehicles, or gathering or Russian officers, that seems like a worthy use of Ukraine’s limited high-precision resources, but there is almost always a ship in a vulnerable position.
As Ukraine has rapidly advanced their skills with aquatic drones, they’ve moved from vehicles made with bolting components, to existing small craft, to custom-made forms that are sleeker, faster, have a longer range, and are harder to detect. The “Sea Baby” drone that Ukraine showcased over the summer has been used against both ships and infrastructure targets. Ukraine is cranking out these drones in numbers while continuing to improve their capabilities.
YouTube Video
According to Ukraine, the Sea Baby can carry up to 850 kilograms of explosives. Ukraine has another, more compact aquatic drone that carries a smaller explosive load but is incredibly fast and maneuverable. Both of these drones have been involved in attacks on Russian ships.
But it’s another drone that may be the new “infernal machine.” And it’s called the Marichka.
According to Naval News, the Marichka is an uncrewed underwater vehicle which is 6 meters long and has an astounding range of 1,000 kilometers. Also known as a UUV, it was created by the volunteer engineering team at AMMO UKRAINE. With an estimated cost of $433,000, the Marichka is much more expensive than the FPV drones buzzing around Ukraine’s skies and about twice the cost of a Sea Baby.
But this is essentially a tornado that can be fired 1,000 kilometers from its target, linger in place for days, pass around obstacles, enter into harbors, and strike in conditions where ships feel safe.
YouTube Video
YouTube Video
UUVs aren’t exactly new. Research vessels with simple guidance systems date back to the 1950s. However, Marichka may be the very first UUV to successfully attack a military ship. If this is actually what took down the Pavel Derzhavin, then it’s a moment far more important than when the Hunley sank the Housatonic. For one thing, Ukraine doesn’t suck. If the tug that showed up to tow the Pavel Derzhavin was sunk in the same way, then there were at least two Marichka deployed in this very first attack.
It’s not going to be 50 years before this happens again. Considering the rate at which Ukraine has been depleting the Russian fleet, it’s not going to be 50 days. There will be more Marichka, and those newer versions will, like the Sea Baby, be more capable and more elusive than the initial versions. Put enough of these in the Black Sea, and Russia will be either shifting the remainder of its fleet elsewhere, or watching it go down.
That’s something that also has to be alarming to every other navy.
One final note: Robert Flemming, the young Black sailor who spotted the Hunley approaching on that long-ago night in Charleston Harbor, was not among those lost when the ship went down. He moved on to serve on another ship; return to Massachusetts after the war; invent a new kind of guitar that created a louder, truer tone than those being sold at the time; patent his invention; and open a business to manufacture his improved guitars. He continued selling his guitars, composing music, and serving as a music teacher long enough to read about the sinking of numerous ships by German U-boats before his death in 1919.
Among Flemming’s compositions was a piece called the “National Funeral Hymn.” Russia might want to borrow it … for those lost to the Marichka.
UK Ministry of Defence estimates for Russian losses
Latest numbers from the UK Ministry of Defence may not match the estimates from UA General Staff, but both numbers are staggering.
The difference between the two is genuinely small considering that the UK numbers omit the losses by Wagner Group, especially the prisoners lost in “meat wave” attacks at Bakhmut. Before his “accident,” Wagner CEO Yevgeny Prigozhin said the losses there had been over 20,000.
Some of the recently recorded equipment losses are hard to credit, but when it comes to the grim matter of human losses … the numbers may be spot on.
Every time one of these things is removed from the battlefield, it’s worth celebrating.
This wasn’t the first such attack by Ukraine. At least one other Russian ship of the same Project 22160 Class, the Sergey Kotov, was reportedly damaged by Ukrainian aquatic drones on Sept. 14, possibly along with a third boat in this class. In October 2022, a reported nine-drone “fleet” attacked Russian ships at anchor near Sevastopol.
Just as with aerial drones, Ukraine has been rapidly developing, innovating, and building new generations of aquatic drones since the Russian invasion began. According to some reports, the Pavel Derzhavin was hit by one of Ukraine’s “Sea Baby” drones, such as the one used in an attack on the Kerch Bridge in September. But there was one feature of the attack that made it stand out. According to Russian sources, “the epicenter of the explosion was underwater.”
So, it seems, was the ship’s attacker.
What happened to the Pavel Derzhavin has an interesting precursor in U.S. history.
On the evening of Feb. 17, 1864, the 1,260-tonne sloop-of-war USS Housatonic was holding station in Charleston Harbor as part of a Union fleet blockading the Confederate Coast. Just after 9 PM, a Black recruit named Robert Flemming, who was stationed high up in the rigging, noticed something odd in the water about 100 meters from the ship and called out a warning. However, his concern was dismissed by a white officer who declared that Fleming had spotted only a log. Two minutes later, an explosion struck the ship on the starboard side. It sank quickly, settling down in 25 feet of water. Because of the shallow bay, only five men were lost in the explosion and subsequent sinking, but the Housatonic had just earned itself a spot in the history books as the first ship to be sunk by a submarine.
The submarine in question was the Confederate boat H. L. Hunley, and while it had just achieved something never before accomplished, within minutes of taking out the Housatonic, the Hunley also sank, killing all eight men on board. More people died on the first “successful” naval attack submarine than on the ship it attacked.
The Hunley, which was found in 1995, salvaged, and now sits in a small museum near the docks from which it launched, is now semi-famous—both for its single exploit and for the ridiculous level of danger it represented for the men on board. The crew that died on Feb. 17, 1864, was actually the second crew to be killed by the treacherous little boat. On Aug. 29, 1863, a bad control caused Hunley to dive with one hatch open. Five men died. On Oct. 15, 1863, the Hunley was practicing its attack maneuver in the harbor and simply failed to surface. Eight more men died in this second accident, including the sub’s designer and namesake. The Hunley made the OceanGate Titan seem like an exemplar of safety, but the Confederate navy just kept dragging the thing back to the surface and feeding it men.
What’s less well-known is that the Hunley wasn’t alone. In ports all over the South, men were struggling to build effective submarines. From the Texas coast to Mobile Bay to the rivers of Virginia (and sometimes at sites well away from the sea), Confederate sympathizers viewed the submarine as a miracle weapon: the one thing that could break the Union blockade. Ambitious designers even wrote about taking the war north to the harbors of Boston and New York, where their new devices would sink ships and make foreign merchants think twice about trading with the Union.
There were some in the Union who feared that all this might be possible. They had a name for these would-be submarine marauders and for the underwater mines that Conderates planted around their harbors. They called them “infernal machines.”
What happened to the Pavel Derzhavin near Sevastopol is far from a second coming of the Housatonic, and Ukraine is in no way like the Confederacy. Not only was the South dedicated to the idea of maintaining slavery and inequality, it also just … sucked. Especially as a place from which a new technology might develop. In fact, the South was technologically regressive expressly because it had built an economy around nearly free manual labor provided through chattel slavery. Had it been the Union who needed to develop submarines, you can bet your ass there would have been submarines.
Ukraine isn’t just a democratic nation fighting for its continued independence and individual liberty; it is also a hotbed of innovation with a long history of higher education and celebrated achievements. What it has done with both aerial and surface drones is astounding. In many ways, Ukraine has rewritten the rules for how an army should operate against a larger but more hidebound enemy. In particular, it has shown how inexpensive aerial drones can reshape the battlefield.
Now they’re taking a step that could impact how navies operate well beyond this war.
At the outset of the unprovoked invasion, there was a widespread fear that Russia’s Black Sea Fleet would so dominate the coasts of Ukraine that they might have free reign over all territory within kilometers. Cities like Odesa might be in serious danger—not because Russia had any skill at conducting a naval landing, but because those ships might make it impossible for the Ukrainian military to operate anywhere near the coast. Russia had a fleet. Ukraine really didn’t. And if navies are worth anything, surely that gave a big edge to Vladimir Putin.
That turned out to be just about 180 degrees from the truth. Ukraine took down the flagship of the Russian fleet barely a month after the invasion began. Since then, Russian ships have been sunk off the piers of Berdyansk, blasted in their main harbor at Sevastopol, and even blown up while in drydock for repairs. Both anti-ship missiles modified for launch from the shore and missiles designed for land targets repurposed to go after ships have been used successfully, as have a growing host of aerial drones that have proven capable of harassing Russian ships almost anywhere they dock.
Six hundred four days after the war’s onset, the Russian Black Sea Fleet has been battered by attacks and is currently down by a reported 20 surface vessels and one very expensive submarine. How many ships and boats are currently damaged isn’t clear, but it’s absolutely obvious that Russia’s remaining fleet is extremely restricted in the operations they can support. They’ve mainly been relegated to acting as floating platforms to launch Kalibr missiles into Ukrainian cities and a means of harassing grain carriers well away from the Ukrainian coast.
Earlier this month, the flagship of the Russian Black Sea Fleet was reportedly moved from Crimea to the Russian port of Novorossiysk, along with several other ships and three submarines, to keep them away from the constant barrage of Ukrainian attacks. A new amphibious carrier ship of the Ivan Rogov class was expected to take on the role of flagship last year, It’s still mysteriously absent.
All of this shows how effective Ukraine has been at not just nullifying what was supposed to be a huge Russian advantage, but also turning it into a resource sink for Russia.
Ukraine has a limited number of high-precision, long-range weapons.
Russia happens to have these things sitting around that cost an estimated $250 million or $350 million each and are guaranteed to hold a couple of hundred personnel, including officers.
There may not always be a concentration of Russian vehicles, or gathering or Russian officers, that seems like a worthy use of Ukraine’s limited high-precision resources, but there is almost always a ship in a vulnerable position.
As Ukraine has rapidly advanced their skills with aquatic drones, they’ve moved from vehicles made with bolting components, to existing small craft, to custom-made forms that are sleeker, faster, have a longer range, and are harder to detect. The “Sea Baby” drone that Ukraine showcased over the summer has been used against both ships and infrastructure targets. Ukraine is cranking out these drones in numbers while continuing to improve their capabilities.
YouTube Video
According to Ukraine, the Sea Baby can carry up to 850 kilograms of explosives. Ukraine has another, more compact aquatic drone that carries a smaller explosive load but is incredibly fast and maneuverable. Both of these drones have been involved in attacks on Russian ships.
But it’s another drone that may be the new “infernal machine.” And it’s called the Marichka.
According to Naval News, the Marichka is an uncrewed underwater vehicle which is 6 meters long and has an astounding range of 1,000 kilometers. Also known as a UUV, it was created by the volunteer engineering team at AMMO UKRAINE. With an estimated cost of $433,000, the Marichka is much more expensive than the FPV drones buzzing around Ukraine’s skies and about twice the cost of a Sea Baby.
But this is essentially a tornado that can be fired 1,000 kilometers from its target, linger in place for days, pass around obstacles, enter into harbors, and strike in conditions where ships feel safe.
YouTube Video
YouTube Video
UUVs aren’t exactly new. Research vessels with simple guidance systems date back to the 1950s. However, Marichka may be the very first UUV to successfully attack a military ship. If this is actually what took down the Pavel Derzhavin, then it’s a moment far more important than when the Hunley sank the Housatonic. For one thing, Ukraine doesn’t suck. If the tug that showed up to tow the Pavel Derzhavin was sunk in the same way, then there were at least two Marichka deployed in this very first attack.
It’s not going to be 50 years before this happens again. Considering the rate at which Ukraine has been depleting the Russian fleet, it’s not going to be 50 days. There will be more Marichka, and those newer versions will, like the Sea Baby, be more capable and more elusive than the initial versions. Put enough of these in the Black Sea, and Russia will be either shifting the remainder of its fleet elsewhere, or watching it go down.
That’s something that also has to be alarming to every other navy.
One final note: Robert Flemming, the young Black sailor who spotted the Hunley approaching on that long-ago night in Charleston Harbor, was not among those lost when the ship went down. He moved on to serve on another ship; return to Massachusetts after the war; invent a new kind of guitar that created a louder, truer tone than those being sold at the time; patent his invention; and open a business to manufacture his improved guitars. He continued selling his guitars, composing music, and serving as a music teacher long enough to read about the sinking of numerous ships by German U-boats before his death in 1919.
Among Flemming’s compositions was a piece called the “National Funeral Hymn.” Russia might want to borrow it … for those lost to the Marichka.
UK Ministry of Defence estimates for Russian losses
Latest numbers from the UK Ministry of Defence may not match the estimates from UA General Staff, but both numbers are staggering.
The difference between the two is genuinely small considering that the UK numbers omit the losses by Wagner Group, especially the prisoners lost in “meat wave” attacks at Bakhmut. Before his “accident,” Wagner CEO Yevgeny Prigozhin said the losses there had been over 20,000.
Some of the recently recorded equipment losses are hard to credit, but when it comes to the grim matter of human losses … the numbers may be spot on.
Booom! There was russian TOS-1A "Solntsepyok", which costs $15 mln, but a $400 FPV drone blew it up.: 59th Motorized Brigade pic.twitter.com/3js4pngbSo
— Defense of Ukraine (@DefenceU) October 22, 2023
Every time one of these things is removed from the battlefield, it’s worth celebrating.