Black Sea — naval USV situation

Recent reports state that several Russian Navy ships will be fitted with laser rangefinder and target tracking units to combat against the ongoing threat of USV attacks. The unit will be operated by a crewmember that will be able to observe targets using a camera and a thermal imager.

It is understood that the Project 18280 ship, “Ivan Khurs”, will get one, along with the reconnaissance ship, SSV-201 “Priazovye”.   This shows which ships are out more often, on the important mission to monitor the gas pipelines. As explained in my previous article, the Ivan Khurs is at a significant disadvantage in effectively dealing with USVs.  Thermal imaging is crucial for night and pre-dawn attack attempts.

At the same time, Black Sea Fleet warships are employing new disruptive camouflage on bow and stern areas, to protect against naval drones, (given the type of onboard cameras and tendancy to launch pre-dawn attacks), as well as hinder satellite imagery to a limited extent.  It is also hampering certain OSINT attempts at counting ships using visible satellite imagery.  To say that it has been done to hamper satellite intelligence gathering is a feeble suggestion, given the different ways of capturing the necessary information, (including IR and radar imagery) used by Western militiaries.

Using dedicated weapon and tracking systems is a first step in the right direction, however, the use of such units is still generally weak compared to designing, testing and installing a fully integrated unit with the ship’s tracking radar system, potentially augemented by the use of AI to monitor the sea surface.

Having an automated system would also be useful in monitoring for the presence of naval mines. Just a couple of days, the Russian authorities issued another alert on the potential presence of drifting mines in the northwestern part of the Black Sea, (TASS report in Russian).  The Russian Ministry of Defence warning is due to the detection of a drifting Ukrainian sea mine, scattered in early 2022 as a result of “haphazardous mining of the Black Sea coast, despite the threat to the safety of navigation”. Currently there are an unknown number of mines are drifting in the Black Sea, posing a permanent threat to shipping.

In March 2022, two mines laid by the Ukrainian military off the coast of Odessa were found drifting off the coast of Romania and Turkey. These were subsequently blown up by naval demining units.

In other instances, naval mines were difused and removed off the coast of Crimea, while a Romanian naval mineaweeper ship got hit by a mine in September 2022