The Journal. - How Ukraine Built a Weapon to Control the Black Sea

Episode Date: June 26, 2024

Ukraine has sunk or damaged about two dozen Russian ships using a technical innovation: naval drones. WSJ’s James Marson unspools the story of the drones’ development and explores how they’re turning the tide in a key area of the war. Further Reading: - How Ukraine’s Naval Drones Turned the Tide in the Battle of the Black Sea  Further Listening: - Ukraine Makes a Deal with Wall Street  - Ukraine's $30 Billion Problem  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ukraine has been at war with Russia for more than two years. And recently, wins have been hard to come by. Here's our colleague James Marson. The Russians, using their greater size, have been able to advance slowly, methodically, with great losses, but still to inch forward, particularly in the east of the country. But despite having a smaller navy, the Ukrainian military has found an effective strategy at sea.

Their key? Naval drones, or sea drones, a kind of unmanned boat about the length of an SUV. Tonight, Ukraine appears to be ramping up its offensive, a sea drone targeting a Russian warship. Sea drones attacking, and the Ukrainians say, sinking a Russian warship inside occupied Crimea. Naval drones are small boats which are controlled by remote control. So they don't have an onboard crew.

They can be steered from a distance. They're grey, they're small, they hang about between the waves, so they're much harder to detect. These drones are part of Ukraine's strategy to make gains against a much larger and better equipped enemy. So what Ukraine has done is find cheap, easy to produce and effective small weapons that can in a way negate that Russian advantage, the advantage of size, by being cheap, fast, nimble, easy to use, and effective. Right. They've had to innovate, essentially, because they can't just meet them toe-to-toe. Right. They can't go toe-to-toe, so they've had to innovate.

And this is perhaps one of the best examples of how they have innovated. Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Jessica Mendoza. It's Wednesday, June 26th. Coming up on the show, inside the Ukrainian innovation that's sinking Russian ships. Ready to kick off? Discover exciting games and events. Plus, find amazing hidden gems in cities full of adventures, delicious food, and diverse cultures. You'll love it so much you'll want to extend your stay beyond the matches. Get the ball rolling on your soccer getaway. Head to visittheusa.com. Russia's war with Ukraine has several important fronts.

One of them is the Black Sea, in part because it's a major avenue for Ukraine to move goods through its port in Odessa. Odessa is very important for Ukraine because Ukraine is an exporting country. And most of those exports have traditionally gone via ships, via the Black Sea. And the Russians had cut that off. They were blockading Odessa. And later they also began to launch cruise missiles from these ships to attack Ukrainian cities.

So it became very, very important for Ukraine to address this problem. Because if Ukraine can't export, in particular, its grains, its agricultural produce, then it wouldn't be able to have an economy strong enough to sustain its war effort. Right. It's an actual stranglehold on the economy. Exactly. Yes. A couple of months into the war, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky directed his security agency, the SBU, to come up with a solution to the blockade. The SBU had established a unit which was tasked with undertaking unconventional warfare.

And the guy in charge of this unit is General Ivan Lukashevich, a diminutive guy with a bushy mustache and a deep voice. He's the architect of the Ukrainian naval drone program. Lukashevich knew that Ukraine didn't have the military capacity to inflict serious losses on Russian ships from long range. So he had to get creative. You got a chance to speak with Lukashevich. What was he thinking? Lukashevich cast his mind back into Ukrainian history

when in the 17th century, the Ukrainian Cossacks had used large numbers of small, fast, nimble boats to defeat the much more powerful navy of the Ottoman Empire. So he took all of this and he began to think about how can we achieve this? The idea that he came up with was to use drones. The problem was, most drones need to be within close range of their control stations to work. Lukasiewicz needed to be able to operate his naval drones at much greater distances.

And he saw an aerial drone up in the air, and he saw that it was being controlled by Starlink. So Starlink is Elon Musk's satellite internet service. So this is sort of a light bulb moment for him, because if you could mount a Starlink terminal on the boat, that would then be able to connect via the satellites, and you could control it in that way. So that's interesting. It's like a mix of historical inspiration and like very, very new technology. Exactly, exactly. So they quickly built a sort of prototype. And it was only a few weeks. And he was he told me how he was standing on the shore and he was controlling a boat that was about 10 miles away and then that's one of those moments

when i think he felt okay this is possible they built these boats um in the initial phase they were built quickly cheaply because they were just trying to see if this thing could work quickly, cheaply, because they were just trying to see if this thing could work. So these craft, they were about 16 feet long, and they could carry about 220 pounds of explosives, and they would sit very low in the water. And they built about a dozen of them, because they had a big target in mind. That target? Russia's naval base in Sevastopol.

That's the heart of Russia's occupation of the Crimean Peninsula, and where its Black Sea fleet is based. But the drone's first mission in September 2022 didn't go as planned. What they did was that, you know, they had a dozen drones. They sent one out as a kind of recon drone. And as it was approaching Sevastopol, it cut out. The signal cut out. So why did it cut out? The signal cut out because Starlink service was not working there. A Ukrainian official tried to persuade Musk to get SpaceX to turn Starlink on, but it didn't work. Musk later wrote on social media that he didn't activate Starlink

because if he had, quote, then SpaceX would be explicitly complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation. So what happened was the reconnaissance drone ran out of gas and the Russians eventually blew it up. Okay, so that first mission, no-go. It ended in failure on the one hand, but on the other hand, it showed them that they could get that far

and that it could work. Like the idea itself was sound. The idea was sound, but they would need slightly different equipment. And so what do they do next? They realized that obviously communications was a key element and that Starlink alone was not going to be the solution to that. So they switched satellite internet providers. And the switch worked. In October 2022, Ukraine sent 12 naval drones to attack Russian ships.

The drones struck and damaged three enemy vessels and a port refueling station. Among the Russians, chaos ensued. One ship that was hit tried to make its way back to port. The frigate which had been attacked by the first three drones, this was limping back to port. The Russian coastal artillery batteries, clearly in a state of confusion,

apparently thinking, you know, they're coming under attack from these very small boats which you can't really see. Explosions are going off, and you see another boat coming in towards you, and that boat was not able to communicate because its antenna had been knocked out. And so what appears to have happened is that they panicked

and started shelling their own ship. Oh, wow. That ship was eventually able to signal it was friendly. Wow. And the firing stopped. But this kind of gives you an idea of the confusion and the fear and the panic that these drones caused among the Russians. In the months to come, naval drones would help Ukraine break Russia's stranglehold of the Black

Sea. That's next. Thank you. you can get customized coverage for your business. Contact a licensed TD Insurance advisor to learn more. Summer is like a cocktail. It has to be mixed just right. Start with a handful of great friends. Now, add your favorite music. And then, finally, add Bacardi Rum. Shake it together. And there you have it.

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Rum 40% alcohol by volume. Emboldened by the initial success of its naval drones, Ukraine turned to a bigger target, one that it's wanted to hit for a long time, the Crimean Bridge. Why did Ukraine want to blow up this bridge? Crimea is quite isolated for Russia. It connects to Ukraine via a very small piece of land to southern Ukraine.

And it connects to mainland Russia only by a 12-mile bridge, which the Russians built and opened in 2018. And with great fanfare, Putin drove a truck over it. It was a big celebration for them. And this was a key way for the Russians to supply their military. You know, they're bringing military vehicles, ammunition, other supplies, fuel. So in order to break that link, Ukraine, from the very beginning, wanted to cripple this bridge. It wanted to damage the bridge and, if possible, take it out as a logistical artery for Russia's military. The Ukrainian military was able to get a hold of the bridge's blueprints, which allowed Lukasiewicz to determine how much firepower he needed to take it down,

nearly 1,800 pounds of explosives. That was more than the original naval drones could carry, so they needed a bigger boat. He brought together a team of military and civilians, engineers, naval officers, communications experts, and others who built a prototype. They tested it using heavy sandbags. They used new materials to make it less visible.

And they gave it a name, Sea Baby. And so by the middle of last year, they were ready to go. And they dispatched five sea drones controlled from Kiev. And they made their way towards the bridge. The Ukrainian military captured the attack on video and posted a dubbed and edited version of it on YouTube. From the cameras, you see them approaching the bridge. It's speeding towards the pillar of the railway bridge.

But there's a lag in the response time, because think about it, the video has got to come back to the control bunker in Kiev. Then the person controlling the drone has to send out the signal to send it, you know, left, right. The controller couldn't make quick maneuvers and the drone missed the pillar the first time. So they spun it around in a U-turn and they slammed it into a pillar of the road bridge. The second drone then comes and smashes into a pillar of the road bridge. The second drone then comes and smashes into a pillar of the railway bridge. When you see the moment of the bridge being hit, you just see big explosions and crowds of debris. Obviously in the bunker in Kiev,

there's jubilation. Lukashevich says, you know, got it. And everyone's cheering. According to Russian authorities, two people died in the attack and a child was injured. Russia also played down the damage on the bridge, saying it planned to repair it. But Ukrainian intelligence said that actually since then, even after repairs, Russia is not able to send heavy military equipment, tanks, ammunition, things like that, over the bridge, which is a huge blow to the Russians. You know, this is a key military artery for the Russian war effort. And this has been largely shut down for heavy military equipment. This is a major blow.

Ukraine's drone strategy has forced Russia out of large parts of the Black Sea and allowed Ukraine to reopen its shipping routes. And it's given Ukraine some important wins in a war that's been difficult on land. The situation on the ground is very difficult for the Ukrainians right now. What we've largely seen is a stalemate. But one place which is a bit of a weak spot for the Russians is Crimea. So what you've seen is with the help of the naval drones, that's part of the picture. They've also used missiles, radars, air defense sites, infrastructure of the Black Sea Fleet, aircraft, airfields, ammunition dumps, fuel dumps,

and they're able to hit and degrade Russian forces and Russian logistics in and leading to Crimea. Are these drones enough to turn the tide for Ukraine more broadly? Ukraine's success with these drones is perhaps the brightest spot for Ukraine at this stage of the war. But there is no one single piece of equipment that is going to be decisive on its own in this war. There's going to be a complex of several factors that could come together to give the Ukrainians an advantage in this war. Sea drones has been and will be one of them. But there are other things that are critical. It's long range missiles, some of which have been provided by the West. It's long range drones, which the Ukrainians are building themselves and have been used to strike military sites deep inside Russia. So there are many different weapon systems, innovations that the Ukrainians are going to need to come together to give them more of an advantage

against this bigger and more powerful military that they're facing. But sea drones are a great example of what the Ukrainians have been able to achieve with a technological innovation that is cheap and effective. That's all for today, Wednesday, June 26th. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. If you like our show, follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. We're out every weekday afternoon. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.