Introduction
The Defence Strategic Review of 2023 (DSR) underlined the importance of the littoral environment in Australia’s future defence needs.[1] As part of this, the DSR outlined an operating concept for army fires as a form of mobile coastal artillery (what Alfred Thayer Mahan would have called a ‘fortress fleet’) designed, in part, to deny use of the littoral environment to hostile forces.[2] This concept tracks closely with the rationale for the marine littoral regiments outlined in the US Marine Corps Force Design 2030 Initiative.[3] While this operating concept has many antecedents in military history, there are few in a modern technological environment. Consequently, whether this operating concept can perform as expected in combat is hard to prove definitively. In this article I examine the implementation of this operating concept by the Ukrainian Armed Forces in order to better understand the implications of this concept for the Australian Defence Force (ADF). This evidence is not perfect—as I outline, the strategic, political and geographic environment in Ukraine differs in important respects from the likely set of future Indo-Pacific scenarios. Yet Ukraine is also the best empirical evidence we have for the use of fires in such a manner under the conditions of the modern mature precision-strike regime.
The Littoral Environment and the Use of Fires
With the renewed rise of great power competition globally and in the Indo-Pacific especially, high-tech, high-end intense conventional warfare in a littoral environment is increasingly seen as being a key task for the ADF, including Army. As the DSR puts it, ‘Army must be optimised for littoral operations in our northern land and maritime spaces and provide a long-range strike capability’.[4] These developments parallel trends in recent thinking in the US Navy and Marine Corps, as reflected in Force Design 2030 and the operating concepts of littoral operations in a contested environment (LOCEs) and expeditionary advance base operations (EABOs). These trends together spell out a role for the US Marine Corps to generate ‘technically disruptive, tactical stand-in engagements that confront aggressor naval forces with an array of low signature, affordable, and risk-worthy platforms and payloads’.[5]
The idea behind these new concepts for both the Australian Army and the US Marine Corps is to use relatively small, dispersed and low-signature but lethal ‘stand-in forces’ based in littoral environments. A major role for these stand-in forces is sea denial through the projection of long-range precision strikes from land to sea. While sea denial is not the only purpose of these stand-in forces, it is a major one. Examining a similar role for the Ukrainian Armed Forces will form the focus for this article.
There are, of course, multiple historical precedents for the use of land-based fires to effect sea denial, from the Russo-Japanese War and World War Two to the Yom Kippur War.[6] None of these wars, however, took place under the mature precision-strike regime of the 2020s. The contemporary campaign by the Houthis in Yemen against international shipping is similar in many respects to the operational concept outlined in the DSR,[7] though the Houthis are faced with a more significant technological inferiority vis-à-vis their opponents than would likely be the case for the ADF. The war in Ukraine represents the most advanced case of the use of fires in a modern littoral environment but also offers a number of drawbacks in terms of application to the Indo-Pacific. This is not only because the war in Ukraine is primarily a land conflict but also because land and sea are not so closely and intricately intertwined on Ukraine’s Black Sea coast as in the multiple small islands of the Indo-Pacific region. There are, moreover, important differences in the political and strategic context of the war in Ukraine when compared to some of the potential scenarios the ADF might face in the Indo-Pacific.
Littoral Combat in Ukraine
Russia’s campaign in the Black Sea littoral was designed to help achieve its overall strategic goal of extinguishing Ukrainian independence and placing the country under the control of a Russian puppet regime.[8] However, the littoral part of the war has gone very poorly in this regard—Russia has achieved the ignominious sobriquet of the country which ‘lost a naval war to a country with no navy’.[9] In no small measure this is due to Ukraine’s use of long-range stand-off fires against the Russian Black Sea Fleet. Ukraine’s striking success in this regard could be taken as a proof of concept for the idea of long-range fires in a littoral environment with the combat service support and kill-chain enablers characteristic of an advanced state military. As we shall see, however, there are a number of important caveats to this widely held view, which do serve to raise questions about whether the success of Ukraine’s use of long-range fires in a littoral environment will necessarily travel into the very different geographic, strategic and political context of a possible future war in the Indo-Pacific environment.
At the beginning of the current war in 2022, Ukraine was certainly overmatched at sea. Ukraine lost 12 of its 17 major warships to Russia along with much of its naval aviation assets in Russia’s illegal annexation of the Crimea in 2014.[10] By 2021 the Ukrainian Navy, relocated to Odessa, fielded one frigate, one corvette, four patrol boats, one mine hunter, one landing ship, one landing craft and a number of smaller vessels.[11] By contrast, the Russian Black Sea Fleet boasted six conventional attack submarines, a cruiser and five frigates with surface-to-surface missile capacity, and a number of other vessels including 13 corvettes, patrol ships, anti-mine warfare vessels and landing ships of various types.[12]
The initial purpose of the Black Sea Fleet appears to have been either to support a potential amphibious landing behind Ukrainian lines on the south coast of Ukraine, or to tie down Ukrainian ground forces to defend against the possibility of such an attack. However, Ukrainian mining of the south coast appears to have removed this as a significant concern from the minds of both Ukrainian and Russian policymakers. The primary purpose of the Black Sea Fleet thereafter was primarily to wage economic warfare on Ukraine by closing Ukraine’s sea lines of communication through the Black Sea. Ukraine’s primary objective in the naval war, conversely, was to keep these lines open.[13]
Russia’s blockade posed a potentially existential threat to Ukraine. Approximately 40 per cent of Ukraine’s export income is derived from agricultural exports,[14] primarily to developing countries.[15] Ninety per cent of these exports were transported by sea from Ukraine’s southern Black Sea ports such as Odessa.[16] At the beginning of the war, Russia blockaded these ports and brought Ukraine’s food exports to a virtual halt. The European Union on one hand, and the UN and Turkey on the other, took steps to unblock the ports via the ‘solidarity lanes’ and ‘Black Sea Grain Initiative’ respectively.[17] However, in July 2023, Russia withdrew from the Black Sea Grain Initiative and food exports from Ukraine declined again.[18]
Not only did this blockade reduce Ukraine’s ability to finance its war effort; it played into Russia’s strategic goals in other ways too. Namely, the blockade contributed both to global food insecurity and to inflation, which provided Russia with coercive leverage over third parties worldwide.[19] Russia may also have aimed to use these global-level economic developments to induce ‘war weariness’ on the part of Ukraine’s supporters and neutral parties, who might be expected to put pressure on Ukraine to concede so as to enable food supplies to resume.[20]
Given its conventional inferiority at sea, Ukraine did not seek to use its small manned naval assets to challenge the Russian blockade. Instead, Ukraine followed a highly innovative and unconventional strategy based on a mixture of unmanned aerial and naval systems along with long-range land-based fires to attack the Black Sea Fleet. This approach has borne fruit with the sinking or destruction of 14 Russian naval vessels, including most famously the Black Sea Fleet’s flagship cruiser Moskva, sunk on 13 April 2022 by a land-based Neptune missile fired from somewhere near Odessa. In addition, a number of other Russian naval vessels have been damaged or even destroyed in similar ways.
Below is a table of all the major known strikes on Russian naval vessels by Ukraine between the beginning of the war in 2022 and the time of writing in November 2024, along with the date, the strike location, the source location of the strike (if known), the method and outcome, and a number of other relevant details. This data is based on open sources and is necessarily incomplete—open-source intelligence is not always in a position to verify whether, for instance, a vessel such as the corvette Askold was indeed damaged beyond repair. Where there is uncertainty, this is noted below. Although many of the successful strikes were carried out by unmanned naval and aerial drones, land-based fires account for many of the most important hits—including the Moskva and the Saratov landing ship.
| Date | Ship | Location struck | Location fired | Method | Outcome | ||||||||||
| 22/3/22 | 1 x Raptor-class patrol boat | Near Snake Island | Undisclosed | Anti-tank guiding missile | Hit and damaged | ||||||||||
|
Details: A video appeared on this date of a Raptor-class patrol boat being hit and damaged by Ukrainian anti-tank guiding missiles. Russian sources state that the ship was towed and repaired.[21] |
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| Date | Ship | Location struck | Location fired | Method | Outcome | ||||||||||
| 24/3/22 |
Saratov Alligator-class landing ship |
Berdyansk Port | Undisclosed | OTR-21 Tochka tactical ballistic missile | Sunk | ||||||||||
|
Details: Saratov was sunk in retaliation for the Russian capture of Berdyansk 10 days earlier. Ukrainian missile strikes set fire to the ship, igniting the ammunitions aboard. The explosion damaged two nearby Ropucha-class landing ships, Tsezar Kunikov and Novocherkassk. The tactical strike disrupted port operations and damaged Russian confidence to operate on the Ukrainian coastline. Video footage showed the ship sinking, satellite imagery confirmed its demise, and Russia confirmed, exactly a year after the attack, the sinking and loss of crew members.[22] |
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| Date | Ship | Location struck | Method | Outcome | |||||||||||
| 17/6/22 |
Veliky Ustyug Buyan-M-class corvette |
Off the Odessa coast | BM21 artillery system | ‘Slightly damaged’ | |||||||||||
|
Details: Photos emerged on social media showing Russia’s Buyan-M-class corvette, reportedly the Velikiy Ustyug, ‘slightly’ damaged in an attack by Ukrainian Forces off the Odesa coast. The images show the Velikiy Ustyug corvette redeploying from the Azov Sea to Caspian for repairs. Apparently, the warship was seriously damaged due to artillery fire from the BM-21 Grad system in March. The Buyan-M-class corvette (pr 21631) is armed with Kalibr missiles. The ships are primarily designed for operations within littoral zones to protect Russia’s vast coastal areas. Due to the small tonnage, they can operate even within shallow parts of oceans and seas and Russia’s river system.[23] |
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| Date | Ship | Location struck | Location fired | Method | Outcome | ||||||||||
| 13/4/22 |
Moskva Slava-class guided missile cruiser |
120 km south of Odessa | Land-based launcher near Odessa | R-360 Neptune anti-ship missiles | Sunk | ||||||||||
|
Details: The BSF’s flagship, the Moskva, was hit by two Neptune missiles on 13/4 and sunk on 14/4. The ship was identified by a US Navy P-8A Poseidon prior to the attack. Moskva was equipped with a triple-tiered air defence that potentially could have mitigated the incoming attack with 3-4 minutes of radar detection warning. There was no evidence to show that the crew had activated these systems. Commentators suggest either that the ship’s radars failed to detect the incoming missiles, or that the defences and crew were not prepared to engage the threat. Reports and imagery suggest that a Bayraktar TB2 drone may have played a role in the event by distracting the crew.[24] |
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| Date | Ship | Location struck | Location fired | Method | Outcome | ||||||||||
| 17/6/22 |
Spasatel Vasily Bekh Project 22870 rescue tug |
En route to resupply Snake Island | Undisclosed | Bayraktar TB2 drones in conjunction with two Harpoon anti-ship missiles | Sunk | ||||||||||
|
Details: Ukrainian missiles struck the rescue vessel on its way to Snake Island. The ship sank shortly after the attack. It reportedly had a Tor-M2KM SAM system on board.[25] |
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| Date | Ship | Location struck | Location fired | Method | Outcome | ||||||||||
|
13/9/23 4/8/24 |
Rostov-on-Don Kilo-class submarine |
Sevastopol | Aircraft above Black Sea | SU-24s armed with Storm Shadow missiles |
13/9/23: ‘Damaged beyond economic repair’ 4/8/24: Sunk |
||||||||||
|
Details: Storm Shadow missiles severely damaged the submarine during a nighttime raid on Sevastopol. Despite military analysts believing it decommissioned for good, Moscow states that it will return to service. On 4/08/24, Ukrainian officials claimed that they had sunk the Rostov-on-Don for good in a missile strike on Sevastopol. The submarine was believed to be repaired from the last attack and undergoing service trials in anticipation of a return to service.[26] |
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| Date | Ship | Location struck | Location fired | Method | Outcome | ||||||||||
| 13/9/23 |
Minsk Ropucha-class landing ship |
Sevastopol | Aircraft above Black Sea | SU-24s armed with Storm Shadow missiles | Sunk | ||||||||||
|
Details: Storm Shadow missiles destroyed the Minsk in an overnight raid on Sevastopol.[27] |
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| Date | Ship | Location struck | Location fired | Method | Outcome | ||||||||||
| 4/11/23 |
Askold Karakurt-class corvette |
Zalyv shipbuilding yard (Kerch, Crimea) | Undisclosed | Cruise missiles | Very likely destroyed or beyond repair | ||||||||||
|
Details: Askold was struck during a missile strike on shipbuilding yards in Kerch. The relatively new ship was carrying Kalibur cruise missiles.[28] |
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| Date | Ship | Location struck | Location fired | Method | Outcome | ||||||||||
| 26/12/23 |
Novocherkassk Ropucha-class landing ship |
Feodosia, southern Crimea | Aircraft above Black Sea | Air-launched cruise missiles | Destroyed | ||||||||||
|
Details: The Ukrainian Air Force struck the Novocherkassk at a naval base in Feodosia. The ship was believed to be carrying Iranian-made drones. The strike caused significant damage, secondary explosions, and heavy Russian casualties.[29] |
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| Date | Ship | Location struck | Location fired | Method | Outcome | ||||||||||
| 23/3/24 |
Ivan Khurs Yury Ivanov-class intelligence ship |
Sevastopol | Undisclosed | Cruise missile | ‘Slightly damaged’ | ||||||||||
|
Details: The Ukrainian fleet have been hunting Ivan Khurs for the duration of the war. Drone boats pursued it in May 2023, but were unsuccessful. Satellite imagery has confirmed the damage of the March 2024 missile strike, but the ship is believed to still be in operation.[30] |
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| Date | Ship | Location struck | Method | Outcome | ||
| 2/5/22 | 2 x Raptor-class patrol boats | Near Snake Island | Bayraktar TB2 drones | Sunk | ||
|
Details: Ukraine has destroyed three Russian Raptor-class patrol ships and damaged a further two since the war began, the Oryx open-source intelligence outlet has visually confirmed. Two of these were destroyed with a Ukrainian Bayraktar drone in May 2022 near Zmiinyi (Snake) Island in the Black Sea, then Chief of General Staff Valeriy Zaluzhniy said at the time. The high-speed patrol boats are capable of engaging in search-and-rescue, anti-sabotage, and anti-terrorism operations.[31] |
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| Date | Ship | Location struck | Method | Outcome | ||
| 7/5/22 | 1 x Serna-class landing craft | Snake Island | Bayraktar TB2 drones | Sunk | ||
|
Details: The Ukrainian military says it has sunk another Russian warship in the Black Sea near Snake Island, declaring that a missile launched from a Bayraktar drone struck a Russian landing craft. ‘In the waters of the Black Sea, an enemy landing craft of the type Serna was destroyed’, military spokesman Serhiy Bratschuk said on his Telegram channel on 7 May. The Ukrainian Defense Ministry said an armed Bayraktar drone also destroyed a missile defence system on Snake Island, a small islet under Russian control. The ministry posted what it says was a video of the ship sinking on its Twitter account. ‘The traditional parade of the Russian Black Sea fleet on May 9 this year will be held near Snake Island—at the bottom of the sea’, the Defense Ministry said.[32] |
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| Date | Ship | Location struck | Method | Outcome | ||
| 29/10/22 |
Ivan Golubets Natya-class minesweeper |
Sevastopol | UAV strike | ‘Slightly damaged’ | ||
|
Details: The Russian Defense Ministry said in October 2022 that the minesweeper Ivan Golubets was damaged during a ‘massive attack’ involving drones on the port city of Sevastopol in Crimea. The operation was conducted with nine Ukrainian unmanned aerial vehicles, and seven ‘maritime drones’, Moscow said.[33] |
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| Date | Ship | Location struck | Method | Outcome | ||
| 29/10/22 |
Admiral Makarov Admiral Grigorovich-class frigate |
Sevastopol | UAV strike | ‘Slightly damaged’ | ||
|
Details: ‘Russia’s Black Sea flagship vessel, the Admiral Makarov, was damaged and possibly disabled during an audacious Ukrainian drone attack over the weekend on the Crimean port of Sevastopol, according to an examination of video footage.’ ‘Open-source investigators said the frigate was one of three Russian ships to have been hit on Saturday (29/10/22). A swarm of drones—some flying in the air, others skimming rapidly along the water—struck Russia’s navy at 4.20 am. Video from one of the sea drones shows the unmanned vehicle weaving between enemy boats.’[34] |
||||||
| Date | Ship | Location struck | Method | Outcome | ||
| 4/8/23 |
Olenegorsky Gornyak Ropucha-class landing ship |
Near the port of Novorossiysk | Likely unmanned sea drone | Seriously damaged | ||
|
Details: A joint effort by the Ukrainian Navy and the Ukrainian SBU (Security Service of Ukraine) resulted in serious damage to the Olenegorsky Gornyak. It was the largest Russian ship to sustain damage since the sinking of the Moskva.[35] |
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| Date | Ship | Location struck | Method | Outcome | ||
|
14/9/23 5/3/24 |
Sergey Kotov Project 22160 patrol ship |
Kerch Strait |
Naval drone attack (9/23) Magura V5 unmanned surface vessels (3/24) |
Damaged (9/23) Sunk (3/24) |
||
|
Details: The Sergey Kotov was damaged by a Ukrainian naval drone strike in September 2023. Six months later, it was struck again by Magura V5 unmanned vehicles off the coast of Crimea and sank after absorbing substantial damage.[36] |
||||||
| Date | Ship | Location struck | Method | Outcome | ||
| 3/9/23 14/9/23 | 2 x KS-701 Tunets patrol boat | North-western Black Sea | Bayraktar drone | Destroyed | ||
|
Details: Ukraine’s Armed Forces destroyed another Russian KS-701 Tunets (Tuna) patrol boat in the northwestern part of the Black Sea, Naval Forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine reported. The KS-701 Tunets is a patrol boat used mainly by Russian border guards and emergency services. The hull of this boat is 8.8 metres (29 feet) long and 2.5 metres (8 feet) wide. A KS-701 Tunets boat can take six to 10 people aboard, plus a captain. The boat’s maximum speed is 37.8 knots (700 km per hour or 435 miles per hour). The operational range is 200 nautical miles (370 km or 230 miles). Ten days before, on 3 September, Ukraine’s Armed Forces used a Turkish-made Bayraktar TB-2 armed drone to destroy another Russian KS-701 Tunets patrol boat with its crew, preventing a Russian landing in the north-western part of the Black Sea in southern Ukraine.[37] |
||||||
| Date | Ship | Location struck | Method | Outcome | ||
| 2/2/2024 | Ivanovets Tarantul-class corvette | Off Crimea | Naval drones | Destroyed | ||
|
Details: Ukrainian forces say they have destroyed a Russian missile boat from the Black Sea Fleet in a special operation off Russian-occupied Crimea. The Ivanovets—a small warship—received ‘direct hits to the hull’ overnight, after which it sank, military intelligence said. It has released video footage that purports to show the moment of impact, followed by a big explosion. There has been no word about the incident from Russian authorities. However, Russian military blogger ‘Voenkor Kotenok’ wrote on Telegram that the boat had sunk after being hit three times by naval drones.[38] |
||||||
| Date | Ship | Location struck | Method | Outcome | ||
| 6/5/2024 | Mangust-class patrol boat | Off Crimea | Magura V5 multipurpose sea drone | Destroyed | ||
|
Details: Ukrainian forces destroyed a Russian military fast attack craft on 6 May, Ukraine’s military intelligence (HUR) reported. The attack was reportedly carried out with a Magura V5 multi-purpose sea drone in occupied Crimea overnight. The agency later identified the targeted Russian vessel as a Mangust-class patrol boat, also known under the designation Project 12150. In recent months, Ukraine had intensified its attacks on occupied Crimea, targeting Russian military assets in and around the Black Sea.[39] |
||||||
| Date | Ship | Location struck | Method | Outcome | ||
| 6/6/2024 | Saturn-class supply tug | Off Crimea | ‘Kamikaze surface drone’ | Destroyed | ||
|
Details: Ukrainian forces are claiming the destruction of a Russian supply tug that was being used to support the forces in Crimea. Reports are that this was the latest in a series of attacks designed to disrupt the supply lines into Crimea. The official statement said that on 6 June a special unit launched an attack on the Crimean coast and that ‘Saturn (the name of the tug) will no longer sail.’ Other statements are saying that it was either the Saturn or Proteus.[40] |
||||||
At the time of writing, these tactical successes have constituted a success for Ukraine’s overall campaign at the strategic level: the Black Sea Fleet had withdrawn from Sevastapol further east to Novorossiysk, the Sea of Azov near Mariupol and occupied Abkazia in Georgia by mid-July 2024.[41] These withdrawals have allowed Ukraine to reopen its shipping lanes and return its agricultural exports to near prewar levels.[42]
Ukraine’s success in exerting sea denial while operating with close to no conventional navy has been a shot in the arm for the idea of using long-range fires in a littoral environment. However, multiple caveats must be borne in mind.
The first is one which will be familiar to most Australian officers—namely that the Ukrainians were so successful in attacking the Black Sea Fleet primarily because they were able to present the Russians with a variety of threats from several different and unexpected vectors. For example, as the table notes, one of the reasons why the Moskva could be successfully targeted by a Neptune missile was that the crew’s defences had been confused by a near simultaneous attack by a set of Bayraktar aerial drones. Long-range fires will work best in a littoral environment when paired with several other potential threats to present enemy defences with multiple dilemmas. In the Australian context, this implies close collaboration between Army and the other service branches, the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) and Royal Australian Navy (RAN).
Moreover, as will be familiar to students of the Ukraine War on land, the littoral war has seen significant adaptation and counteradaptation on both sides, which has in some cases served to blunt the initial advantage which land-based Ukrainian fires enjoyed in facing the Black Sea Fleet. As in the land battle, electronic warfare (EW) and increased fortification has been crucial in this regard. Systems such as Krasukha-4, Murmansk-BN and R-330Zh Zhitel have been instrumental in jamming GPS signals that are relied upon by Ukrainian long-range missiles.[43] More recently, Russian EW adaptation has prevented many of Ukraine’s new ground-launched small-diameter bombs (GLSDBs) from hitting their intended targets.[44] Russian jamming has effectively disabled the GPS navigation systems in GLSDBs used in 2024.[45] Similar jamming methods have been used to deter Excalibur 155-millimetre artillery munitions.[46]
Moscow has also been deploying spoofing and decoy systems in its EW. The Pole-21 system is perhaps the most prominent of these and has been used in attempts to confuse GPS-guided missiles by transmitting false positional data.[47] Ukraine has been targeting such systems, with the most recent attack occurring in August 2024, damaging a former offshore gas platform used for GPS spoofing.[48]
American-supplied weapons, namely the Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) and the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HiMARS) have proven to be susceptible to Russian jamming efforts.[49] Russian counter-satellite systems have also been powerful enough to degrade encrypted ‘M-Code signals’ from the US GPS constellation.[50] Russian media has targeted these vulnerabilities to undermine Ukrainian and American confidence. Outside of long-range precision munitions, Russian EW has been effective at adapting to counter the Bayraktar TB2 drones that wreaked havoc in the early stages of the war.[51] The aforementioned utility of combined attacks with drones and long-range precision munitions is reduced when competent jamming systems are in used to mitigate the drone side of the attack.
Russian EW capabilities are also often integrated with air defence systems, such as the S-400 and Pantsir-S1. This multi-layered protection has been part of the reinforcements in Sevastopol.[52]
When looking at applying the Ukrainian littoral tactical complex of long-range fires, mines, aircraft and air and sea drones to a potential scenario in the Indo-Pacific, moreover, multiple potential caveats emerge. These stem from the political, strategic and geographic differences with the war in Ukraine. Here I will outline them one by one.
The Littoral Campaign Was Never the Main Focus of Russia’s Effort
The initial focus of Russia’s war effort was Kyiv, to remove the Zelenskyy government and replace it with a friendly, pro-Russian puppet. Once it had become clear that this goal was unrealistic, the Russians switched the main locus of their efforts to the east. At no point was the campaign against Ukraine’s sea lines of communication the main focus of Russia’s effort.[53] If it had been, perhaps they would have been able to overcome the Ukrainian littoral tactical complex through sheer force of numbers and effort, as they slowly did in the ground campaign in the Donbas, for instance. The reason why this matters is that in a future Indo-Pacific contingency, the littoral environment is quite likely to be at the centre of the enemy’s main effort, which implies that they would mount a more determined attempt to overcome American, Australian or allied resistance than the Russians did to overcome Ukraine in the Black Sea.
The Ukrainian Littoral Tactical Complex Relies on C5ISR Support from Western Allies Which the Russians, for Obvious Reasons, Did Not Go All Out to Interdict
Some reports claim that the sinking of the Moskva was enabled in part by intelligence from a US P-8 Poseidon surveillance aircraft,[54] while other strikes on the Black Sea Fleet may have been enabled by US satellite intelligence.[55] While the Russians have attempted to jam or hack American and European command, control, communications, computers, cyber, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (C5ISR) capabilities which were helping Ukraine (for instance, Starlink satellites), they have not attempted to shoot them down or physically attack them. There have, for instance, been no attempts made to use kinetic space-based assets to attack US satellite capabilities helping the Ukrainians. In a future Indo-Pacific contingency, this may not be the case, making it harder for Australia and its allies to use long-range land-based fires against enemy shipping. In most cases, the assumption is that the US and the People’s Republic of China would be active combatants on opposing sides and would use kinetic measures to attack each other’s C5ISR capabilities. Chinese fighters would attempt to shoot P8s down and use space-based weapons to attack US satellites,[56] in addition to any jamming measures undertaken by EW units.
Russia’s Geography, Combined with the Montreux Convention, Prevented the Russians from Reinforcing the Black Sea Fleet with Similar Capabilities from Other Russian Naval Commands
Russia’s geography, with multiple coastlines separated from one another by vast distances, has always complicated the task of the Russian Navy. The Russian Navy is divided into four fleets—the Baltic Fleet, the Northern Fleet and the Pacific Fleet in addition to the Black Sea Fleet.[57] Ships from one fleet cannot easily reinforce one another since they have to traverse possible hostile seas and choke points. This means that once a key vessel such as the Moskva is sunk, it can be very hard to replace even if similar capacities exist in another fleet. The Moskva played a crucial coordinating role for the anti-missile and anti-air defences of the Black Sea Fleet as a whole. After it was sunk, it could have been replaced by another Slava-class cruiser from a different Russian fleet, such as the Marshall Ustinov of the Northern Fleet or the Varyag of the Pacific Fleet. However, this would have implied the necessity for one of these vessels to transit the Dardanelles. According to the Montreux Convention, the right to grant such transit rights is reserved to the Turkish Government, which refused them to Russia.[58] Why does this matter? In an Indo-Pacific contingency, Australia’s adversaries may not require such transit rights and hence may be able more easily to replace any large vessels sunk by long-range fires. If the Moskva could have been replaced, Russia might have been able to maintain its chokehold over Ukraine’s sea lanes.
The Geography of Ukraine Facilitates Resupply of Long-Range Fires Units and Also Facilitates Their Ability to Move to New Firing Points, as Compared with the Indo-Pacific
We do not know where exactly the Neptune missile which sank the Moskva was fired from. For illustrative purposes, however, I plot in Figure 1 a circle the radius of which is the maximum range of the Neptune missile reaching from the approximate site at which the Moskva was hit.
Anything to the west of the Dnipro River at approximately 47’N, 32’E can be taken at that time to be under fairly firm Ukrainian control. The area bounded by the Dnipro to the east, the Romanian border to the west, the coast to the south and the maximum range of the Neptune to the north can be taken to be the area from which the fatal shot might have been fired. This is a fairly large and extensive land mass far beyond the capability of Russian ground forces to interdict and hard, moreover, for Russian surveillance assets to sift through. By contrast, the geography of the Indo-Pacific, consisting to a large degree of small islands, offers a much smaller set of land masses in which mobile long-range artillery units can move, conceal and fire without being vulnerable to enemy detection and/or amphibious assault.[59] The ability for such units to manoeuvre in Ukraine, moreover, is greater given the flatter terrain and more extensive road system. Forces operating in the Indo-Pacific will find it harder to manoeuvre mobile artillery platforms to new positions after firing in order to escape enemy return fire, though on the other hand the terrain of the Indo-Pacific may also make it easier to conceal these platforms prior to first engaging the enemy. To illustrate this, I plot in Figure 2 and Figure 3 the road networks of Odessa Oblast in Ukraine and the Ilocos Norte Province in Northern Luzon in the Philippines, using data taken from OpenStreetMap.[60]
Even for off-road vehicles such as the carrier of the multiple launch rocket system, Ukraine is arguably better terrain to operate in given the relative flatness of the land and lack of dense forests. In Figure 4, I plot forest cover in the Black Sea region from Hansen et al. (2013).[61] Hansen et al. used the Landsat Thematic Mapper’s imagery to provide measures of forest cover at high resolution across the world. The lighter shaded regions represent forested areas. The darker areas have no forests. The lightly coloured region at the bottom of the plot is northern Turkey and the lighter region towards the top is the southern tip of Crimea. As we can see, southern Ukraine is almost entirely denuded of forests. This may be bad for individual soldiers as the terrain provides minimal natural cover, but it also makes it easier for heavy vehicles, tracked or untracked, to manoeuvre.
By contrast, many islands in the Indo-Pacific are extensively forested. This is well illustrated by a plot taken from the same data source of the Philippines in Figure 5 (the long, lighter coloured strip on the left represents the east coast of Luzon).
Ukraine is also superior terrain for tracked or untracked vehicles because it is relatively flat. Nathan Nunn and Diego Puga developed a measure designed to capture this variable called ‘terrain ruggedness’.[62] This can be thought of as the average distance in elevation between two points within the same square kilometres in a given country. In countries with large numbers of mountains and valleys, for instance, this distance will tend to be high—Switzerland’s ruggedness score is 476.1 metres, while that of the Netherlands is 3.7 metres. According to this measure, Ukraine is significantly flatter than most of the Indo-Pacific nations in which a littoral battle might be fought. Ukraine has a ruggedness score of 41.6 metres (and this score is inflated by the Carpathian mountain range in western Ukraine, which is out of range of the Black Sea). By contrast, the Philippines comes in at 202.8 metres, Indonesia at 96.7 metres and Papua New Guinea at a whopping 158.9 metres.[63] In short, the ability of long-range surveillance units in Ukraine to fire, then rapidly move to avoid Russian retaliation will almost certainly be much higher than the ability of similar units to pull off a similar feat in a littoral environment such as the Indo-Pacific.
Perhaps even more importantly, Ukrainian long-range artillery units and the units supporting their operations (including infantry and armour) can be relatively straightforwardly supplied over land from the neighbouring European countries in a manner which may prove much harder in a littoral Indo-Pacific environment.
At this point I should acknowledge that the goals of long-range fires in the littoral environment of the Indo-Pacific might be somewhat less ambitious than in Ukraine. In current US Marine doctrine, for instance, the goal of stand-in forces such as the Marine Littoral Regiments is partly to delay hostile forces in order to allow time to bring in reinforcements.[64] The littoral regiments need not necessarily halt the enemy’s naval operations altogether, as the Ukrainians have effectively done. Nonetheless, caution should be taken in extrapolating from the undoubted strategic successes the Ukrainians have had with long-range land-based fires in a littoral environment to the very different context of the Indo-Pacific. The evidence from Ukraine is the best empirical evidence that we currently have of how effective long-range land-based fires can be in a littoral environment, but that does not mean we cannot use other types of evidence to explore how land-based fires might play out in a littoral environment in the Indo-Pacific.
Conclusion
The campaign of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) in the Black Sea is an impressive achievement and has had important operational consequences. With few remaining manned sea vessels of their own, the Ukrainians have sunk or damaged a large number of Russian warships, including large and important vessels such as the Moskva. These losses have forced Russia to effectively withdraw the Black Sea Fleet from the western portion of the Black Sea, where Ukraine’s sea lines of communication lie. This achievement has provided important strategic benefits for Ukraine, allowing it to resume seaborne exports crucial to Kyiv’s economic survival. Unquestionably, this constitutes a solid proof of concept for the idea of using land-based fires to exercise sea denial. Importantly, however, it was not land-based fires alone which contributed to this outcome—air-fired missiles and air and sea drones also accounted for a substantial portion of Russian losses. Perhaps most importantly, the combination of multiple threat vectors is most potent—as the reported distraction of the Moskva’s crew by Bayraktar drones shows. This points to the fact that a reorientation of the Australian Army to the littoral environment must also involve extensive collaboration with the RAAF and RAN and the incorporation of autonomous air and sea systems into a joint kill chain. It must also involve extensive investment in electromagnetic spectrum capabilities to frustrate attempted jamming and spoofing countermeasures and to protect Australia’s own kill web, especially satellites and a range of active and passive sensors to detect enemy assets.
That said, however, this article has raised some points of caution around over-extrapolating from the Ukrainian experience. For a number of reasons, the Black Sea is an environment more conducive to the success of land-based fires against shipping than the Indo-Pacific is likely to be. These reasons include the relatively low priority accorded the naval campaign by Russia, and the particular circumstances of the Montreux Convention and Turkey’s refusal to allow Russian vessels to transit the Dardanelles. Similarly, the reluctance of the Russians, for obvious reasons, to directly target the Western C5ISR infrastructure aiding the Ukrainians is unlikely to be replicated in the Indo-Pacific. This would make the ADF’s job in attempting to execute long-range precision-strike warfare from the land to the sea in the Indo-Pacific much harder than the AFU’s effort in the Black Sea. This realisation points to the need to provide a robust set of enablers for these strikes—including satellites and active and passive sensors combined with possibly AI-powered data analysis—and for a set of capabilities to protect those enablers. If they can be neutralised, then long-range precision-strike capabilities will be rendered blind and ineffective.
Geography is also important. Ukraine’s flat, bare geography and highly developed road system allows vehicle-borne missiles to operate relatively free from enemy interference. The flip side of this is that the dense jungle of much of the Indo-Pacific allows fire systems to be more easily concealed prior to being used. This in turn might imply the need for different types of fire systems—instead of expensive but mobile systems such as the HiMARS, perhaps a better option would be a larger number of cheaper and hence more expendable systems which are assumed to only fire once while their crews conceal and or escape without the use of large road vehicles. Relative to Ukraine, logistics would also be a huge complicating factor in applying long-range precision fires in the littoral domain that characterises the Indo-Pacific. Whereas AFU long-range strike units can be resupplied overland from Europe, stand-in forces in the Indo-Pacific would be reliant on either host country supplies (which would in turn involve a set of political and economic complications), or on resupply by sea. Successful implementation of the long-range precision-strike concept in the Indo-Pacific littoral would require a secure supply chain back to Australia and/or other secure base countries. These chains could, however, be subject to interdiction by enemy resources, including their own reconnaissance strike complex. In terms of future research, testing the theory behind fires in a littoral environment will also require complementary approaches tailored more closely to the Indo-Pacific’s strategic and natural geography, such as wargaming.
Acknowledgement
The author would like to acknowledge the contribution of his research assistant, Will Scott, in the preparation of this article.
Endnotes
[1] Australian Government, National Defence: Defence Strategic Review (Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia, 2023); John Nash, ‘Land Power in the Littoral: An Australian Perspective’, Journal of Advanced Military Studies 15, no. 2 (2023): 1–13.
[2] James Holmes, ‘China’s “Fortress Fleet” Comes of Age’, in Lowell Dittmer and Maochun Yu (eds), Routledge Handbook of Chinese Security (London: Routledge, 2015), pp. 201–216; James Holmes, ‘A “Fortress Fleet” for China’, The Whitehead Journal of Diplomacy and International Relations 11, no. 2 (2010): 115; Richard Dunley, ‘Unsinkable Ships? Theoretical and Historical Groundings of Joint Operations for Sea Control’, Australian Army Journal 19, no. 2 (2023): 164.
[3] US Marine Corps, Force Design 2030 (Washington DC: US Marine Corps, 2020).
[4] Defence Strategic Review, p. 7.
[5] US Marine Corps, Force Design, p. 3.
[6] Ash Zimmerlie, ‘Corbett Down Under: Sir Julian Corbett, Maritime Strategy, and Australian Land Power in the Indo-Pacific Arc’, Australian Army Journal 19, no. 2 (2023): 1.
[7] Andrew Rolander, ‘Houthis’ Lesson for the US Army: How a Land Force Can Fight a Maritime War’, The Strategist, 8 November 2024, at: https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/houthis-lesson-for-the-us-army-how-a-land-force-can-fight-a-maritime-war/.
[8] Michael Kofman, ‘The Russia-Ukraine War: Military Operations and Battlefield Dynamics’, in Hal Brands (ed.), War in Ukraine: Conflict, Strategy, and the Return of a Fractured World (New York: Routledge, 2024), pp. 99–120.
[9] Brian Glyn Williams, ‘How the Ukrainians—with No Navy—Defeated Russia’s Black Sea Fleet’, The Conversation, 19 July 2024, at: https://theconversation.com/how-the-ukrainians-with-no-navy-defeated-russias-black-sea-fleet-234259.
[10] Tim Ripley, ‘Ukrainian Navy Decimated by Russian Move into Crimea’, Janes (website), 25 March 2014, at: https://web.archive.org/web/20140325234737/http:/www.janes.com/article/35861/ukrainian-navy-decimated-by-russian-move-into-crimea.
[11] International Institute for Strategic Studies, The Military Balance 2021 (London: Routledge, 2021), p. 210.
[12] Ibid., pp. 193–197.
[13] Albert F Lord Jr and Thomas R Kunish, ‘Lessons from the War at Sea’, in John F Nagl and Katie Crombe (eds), A Call to Action: Lessons for the Future Force from Ukraine (Carlisle PA: Army War College Press, 2024), pp. 247–258.
[14] Noah Berman, Mariel Ferragamo and Sabine Baumgartner, ‘How Ukraine Overcame Russia’s Grain Blockade’, Council on Foreign Relations (website), 27 February 2024, at: https://www.cfr.org/article/how-ukraine-overcame-russias-grain-blockade.
[15] ‘How the Russian Invasion of Ukraine Has Further Aggravated the Global Food Crisis’, European Council (website), at: https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/infographics/how-the-russian-invasion-of-ukraine-has-further-aggravated-the-global-food-crisis/.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Ibid.
[18] Michelle Nichols and Guy Faulconbridge, ‘Black Sea Grain Deal Expires After Russia Quits’, Reuters, 18 July 2023, at: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/black-sea-grain-deal-expire-monday-if-russia-quits-2023-07-17/.
[19] Joanna Partridge, ‘Grain Prices Rise After Russian Pullout of Black Sea Deal Sparks Food Crisis Fears’, The Guardian, 20 July 2023, at: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/jul/20/rising-grain-prices-russia-pullout-black-sea-deal-food-crisis-fears.
[20] Karl A Scheuerman, ‘Weaponizing Wheat: How Strategic Competition with Russia Could Threaten American Food Security’, Joint Force Quarterly 111 (2023): 34–49.
21 Vadim Kushnikov, ‘The Russians Confirm the Damage to the Raptor-Class Boat Near Mariupol’, Militarnyi, 22 March 2022, at: https://mil.in.ua/en/news/the-russians-confirm-the-damage-to-the-raptor-class-boat-near-mariupol/.
[22] Sam LaGrone, ‘Satellite Images Confirm Russian Navy Landing Ship Was Sunk at Berdyansk’, USNI News, 25 March 2022, at: https://news.usni.org/2022/03/25/satellite-images-confirm-russian-navy-landing-ship-was-sunk-at-berdyansk.
[23] Dylan Malyasov, ‘New Photos Show Damaged Russian Corvette After Ukranian Forces Attack’, Defence Blog, 17 June 2022, at: https://defence-blog.com/new-photos-show-damaged-russian-corvette-after-ukrainian-forces-attack/.
[24] Luke Harding, Pjotr Sauer, Julian Borger and Jessica Elgot, ‘Russia’s Moskva Cruiser Sinks after Stormy Seas, Says Defense Ministry’, The Guardian, 15 April 2022, at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/apr/14/russia-moskva-cruiser-sunk-stormy-seas-defense-ministry.
[25] Jeff Lisi, ‘Russian Boat Reportedly Sunk While Bringing Supplies to Black Sea Island Made Famous by Ukrainian Guards’, Stars and Stripes, 17 June 2024, at: https://www.stripes.com/theaters/europe/2022-06-17/ukraine-says-it-sunk-another-russian-ship-6373113.html.
[26] Sam LaGrone, ‘Russian Attack Submarine Sunk in Missile Strike on Black Sea Port Claims Ukraine’, USNI News, 4 August 2024, at: https://news.usni.org/2024/08/04/russian-attack-submarine-sunk-in-missile-strike-on-black-sea-port-claims-ukraine.
[27] Mason Clark, ‘Ukraine Wiped Out Russia’s Black Sea Fleet Warships’’, Business Insider, February 2024, at: https://www.businessinsider.com/warships-in-russia-black-sea-fleetthat-ukraine-wiped-out-2024-2.
[28] Jeff Stevens, ‘Ukraine Sinking Them Faster Than Russia Can Build Them’, Australian Naval Institute, 25 May 2024, at: https://navalinstitute.com.au/ukraine-sinking-them-faster-than-russia-can-build-them/.
[29] Karoun Demirjian, ‘Ukrainian Strike Damages Russian Landing Ship Novocherkassk in Feodosia’, The Washington Post, 26 December 2023, at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/12/26/novocherkassk-russia-landing-ship-attacked/.
[30] David Axe, ‘Russia’s “Ivan Khurs” Spy Ship Keeps Tabs on Ukrainian Radars and Missiles. No Wonder the Ukrainians Have Been Hunting the Ship for a Year’, Forbes, 28 March 2024, at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2024/03/28/russias-ivan-khurs-spy-ship-keeps-tabs-on-ukrainian-radars-and-missiles-no-wonder-the-ukrainians-have-been-hunting-the-ship-for-a-year/.
[31] Isabel van Brugen, ‘Every Russian Black Sea Ship Sunk or Disabled by Ukraine’, Newsweek, 31 March 2024, at: https://www.newsweek.com/every-russian-black-sea-ship-sunk-damaged-ukra…https://www.newsweek.com/every-russian-black-sea-ship-sunk-damaged-ukraine-full-list-1884448.
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[33] van Brugen, ‘Every Russian Black Sea Ship Sunk or Disabled’.
[34] Luke Harding and Isobel Koshiw, ‘Russia’s Black Sea Flagship Damaged in Crimea Drone Attack, Video Suggests’, The Guardian, 31 October 2022, at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/30/russias-black-sea-flagship-damaged-in-crimea-drone-attack-video-suggests.
[35] Daniel Boffey, ‘Ukraine Says It Has Put Russian Warship Out of Action in Sea Drone Attack’, The Guardian, 5 August 2023, at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/04/ukraine-says-it-has-put-russian-warship-out-of-action-in-sea-drone-attack.
[36] ‘Russian Patrol Vessel “Sunk” off the Coast of Occupied Crimea, Ukraine Military Claims’, Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, 5 March 2024, at: https://www.rferl.org/a/ukraine-russian-ship-kotov-destroyed-crimea-drones-magura-v5/32848407.html.
[37] Serge Havrylets, ‘Ukraine’s Naval Forces Destroy Russian Patrol Boat in the Black Sea’, EuroMaidan Press, 13 September 2023, at: https://euromaidanpress.com/2023/09/13/ukraines-naval-forces-destroy-russian-patrol-boat-in-the-black-sea/.
[38] Robert Greenall, ‘Ukraine “Hits Russian Missile Boat Ivanovets in Black Sea”’, BBC News, 2 February 2024, at: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-68165523.
[39] Kateryna Hodunova and Martin Fornusek, ‘Updated: Ukraine Destroys Russian Fast Attack Craft in Occupied Crimea’, Kyiv Independent, 26 June 2025, at: https://kyivindependent.com/military-intelligence-ukraine-destroys-russian-speedboat-in-occupied-crimea/.
[40] ‘Video: Ukraine Claims Sinking Russian Tug Used in Supply of Crimea’, The Maritime Executive, 6 June 2024, at: https://maritime-executive.com/article/video-ukraine-claims-sinking-russian-tug-used-in-supply-of-crimea.
[41] Peter Dickinson, ‘Russia’s Retreat from Crimea Makes a Mockery of the West’s Escalation Fears’, Atlantic Council, 16 July 2024, at: https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/russias-retreat-from….
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[43] Bryan Clark, ‘The Fall and Rise of Russian Electronic Warfare’, IEEE Spectrum, 30 July 2022, at: https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-fall-and-rise-of-russian-electronic-warfare.
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[45] Isabelle Khurshudyan and Alex Horton, ‘Russian Jamming Leaves Some High-Tech U.S. Weapons Ineffective in Ukraine’, Washington Post, 24 May 2024, at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/05/24/russia-jamming-us-weapo….
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[47] ‘Pole-21E Russian RF Jammer’, OE Data Integration Network (website), at: https://odin.tradoc.army.mil/WEG/Asset/Pole-21E_Russian_RF_Jammer.
[48] ‘Ukrainian Forces Attack Black Sea Gas Platform Used by Russia for GPS “Spoofing,” Navy Says’, Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, 10 August 2024, at: https://www.rferl.org/a/ukraine-russia-war-platform-black-sea-attack-pl….
[49] Carlotta Gail and Vladyslav Golovin, ‘Some U.S. Weapons Stymied by Russian Jamming in Ukraine’, The New York Times, 25 May 2024, at: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/25/world/europe/us-weapons-russia-jamming-ukraine.html.
[50] Olga R Chiriac and Thomas Withington, ‘Russian Electronic Warfare: From History to Modern Battlefield’, Irregular Warfare Initiative, 21 March 2024, at: https://irregularwarfare.org/articles/russian-electronic-warfare-from-history-to-modern-battlefield/.
[51] Carl Rhodes, ‘The Rapid Advance of Uncrewed Aerial System Technology and Operating Concepts in the Russia-Ukraine Conflict’, Land Power Forum.
[52] HI Sutton, ‘Russia’s Powerful Invisible Defenses Around Sevastopol Rendered Visible’, Naval News, 28 November 2023, at: https://www.navalnews.com/naval-news/2023/11/russias-powerful-invisible-defenses-around-sevastopol-rendered-visible/.
[53] Lord and Kunish, ‘Lessons from the War at Sea’.
[54] ‘Ukraine War: US Spy Plane on Patrol in Black Sea before Sinking of Russian Flagship Moskva’, The Times, 30 April 2022, at: https://www.thetimes.com/article/ukraine-war-us-spy-plane-on-patrol-in-black-sea-before-sinking-of-russian-flagship-moskva-fblbg0znd; ‘US Intelligence Helped Ukraine Sink Russia’s Flagship Cruiser Moskva’, ABC News, 6 May 2022, at: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-05-06/us-intelligence-leads-to-ukraine….
[55] Nick Pearson, ‘US Provided Intelligence That Helped Ukraine Target Russian Generals, Warship: Reports’, 9 News, 6 May 2022, at: https://www.9news.com.au/world/ukraine-russian-generals-targeted-us-intelligence-war-invasion-moskva-sinking/28dd38a4-e327-48eb-9bbd-feb33517ebd4.
[56] Bruce W MacDonald, China, Space Weapons and U.S. Security, Council Special Report No. 38 (Council on Foreign Relations, 2008), at: https://www.cfr.org/report/china-space-weapons-and-us-security.
[57] International Institute for Strategic Studies, The Military Balance 2021, pp. 193–197.
[58] Alpaslan Ozerdem, ‘What the Montreux Convention Is, and What It Means for the Ukraine War’, The Conversation, 2 March 2022, at: https://theconversation.com/what-the-montreux-convention-is-and-what-it-means-for-the-ukraine-war-178136.
[59] Of course this would not be an issue with shoulder-launched anti-ship missiles but these have much shorter range and lower penetration—adversary naval vessels could simply stay further from the coast to be safe from them.
[60] Manuel J Eugster and Thomas Schlesinger, OpenStreetMap (2012), at: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=4/-28.15/133.28.
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[62] Nathan Nunn and Diego Puga, ‘Data and Replication Files for “Ruggedness: The Blessing of Bad Geography in Africa”’, Diego Puga (website), at: https://diegopuga.org/data/rugged/.
[63] ‘Terrain Ruggedness Index’, Our World in Data (website), at: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/terrain-ruggedness-index.
[64] United States Marine Corps, A Concept for Stand-in Forces (Washington DC: U.S. Marine Corps, 2021), p. 3.