Ukrainian drone attacks in the Black Sea are forcing Russian ships to bounce from port to port and the Russian Navy to build harbor defenses, all of which complicates naval operations, according to new satellite imagery and analysis.
Space-based intelligence company BlackSky has been collecting images over the Black Sea since January 2022. Making up to 15 passes a day, the company’s imagery and AI-enabled analytics platform has accumulated 70,000 ship detections.
One analyst looked at imagery and accompanying BlackSky data of Black Sea ports after Ukrainian missiles struck warships and the naval base at Sevastopol last September. Over the following four months, ship traffic dropped 18 percent at the Crimean port—and increased by more than 20 percent in Feodosia (100 miles away, on the other side of Crimea) and Novorossiysk (more than 200 miles away on Russia’s Black Sea coast). In December, many of the Feodosia-stationed vessels moved on to the base at Novorossiysk. And just last week, the ships departed again for unknown ports further away from Ukraine, the analyst said.
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