In 2024, the Main Naval Parade in honour of the Russian Navy Day, hosted by Vladimir Putin himself, was the smallest in the history of the event. The ceremony in St Petersburg on 28 July was attended by 20 ships and boats, one submarine and four sailing vessels. A total of 25 vessels. At the same time, for the first time in 8 years, the maritime part of the parade in Kronstadt was cancelled, the BBC reports.
None of the ships previously reported by the Ukrainian Armed Forces to have been destroyed or damaged took part in the parade.
The event in the northern capital was attended by only two ships of the Black Sea Fleet – the corvette Mercury, which has been performing tasks at the Russian base in Tartus since 2024, and the frigate Admiral Grigorovich, the newspaper notes.
For comparison, in 2023, 45 ships took part in the Main Naval Parade in honour of the Navy Day in St. Petersburg and Kronstadt. More than 40 ships took part in the 2022 parade. In 2021, it was more than 50.
According to the Oryx monitoring project, since the start of the full-scale war, Ukraine, which has no navy at all, has been able to sink or damage 26 ships and submarines of the Black Sea Fleet, which is one third of the BSF, using missiles and naval drones.
This allowed Kyiv to reduce the threat of amphibious operations and the use of Russian ships to shell Ukrainian territory, as well as to clear the Black Sea for the export of its agricultural products.
In particular, the ships Caesar Kunikov, Novocherkassk, Saratov, Olenegorskiy Gornyak and Minsk, as well as the flagship of the Black Sea Fleet Moskva and the submarine Rostov-on-Don were damaged or destroyed.
In March, the newest patrol ship, the Sergei Kotov, was sunk.
In addition, in September 2023, the Armed Forces of Ukraine launched a missile attack on the Black Sea Fleet headquarters in Sevastopol. In May, the last Black Sea Fleet missile ship in Crimea, the Cyclone, was destroyed by ATACMS missiles.
The successful actions of the Ukrainian Armed Forces forced Russia to withdraw its Black Sea Fleet ships from Crimea, where they had been based for 240 years, and now it has to patrol the Black Sea with submarines. Russian ships have begun to conduct training exercises in the Azov Sea, as the Russian Armed Forces command considers it safer than the Black Sea.
On the night of 3 July, Ukrainian unmanned boats attacked the city of Novorossiysk in Krasnodar Krai, where Russia had moved most of the Black Sea Fleet ships from Sevastopol after the Ukrainian armed forces' strikes.
Background. In July, it was reported that the United States had provided Ukraine with Metal Shark speedboats. They are equipped with modern navigation, control, automatic fire extinguishing systems and video surveillance cameras.