Ukraine reached the port where Russia's Black Sea Fleet took shelter and hit four of its warships. On the night of 12 August 2026, in a joint operation, Ukraine's Defense Forces struck the naval base at Novorossiysk in Russia's Krasnodar Krai, the General Staff reported.

Novorossiysk became Russia's main Black Sea naval base after Ukrainian strikes and sea drones drove the fleet out of occupied Sevastopol in Crimea, so reaching its warships there strikes at the refuge that was supposed to be safe.

The ships that were hit

The four vessels are among the fleet's more capable surface combatants. The two Project 11356 frigates, Admiral Makarov and Admiral Essen, are among the newest and most important surface ships Russia has kept in the Black Sea, both capable of launching Kalibr cruise missiles at Ukraine.

The Buyan-M is another Kalibr shooter. The Project 21631 small missile ship carries the same cruise missiles Russia fires at Ukrainian cities, and the Vasily Bykov is a patrol ship of the class Ukraine has struck before, so the strike damaged both major missile-carrying combatants and a patrol vessel in one night.

The overall damage at the base is still being assessed.

The fleet has no safe harbor left

The strike extends a campaign that has steadily pushed Russia's fleet eastward and out of action. Ukraine drove the Black Sea Fleet from Sevastopol without a navy of its own, using drones and missiles, forcing Russia to pull its ships back to Novorossiysk, farther from Ukraine but not out of reach.

This means that Russia holds no waters it can use and now no harbor where its ships are safe. Ukraine's Defense Forces said they consistently reduce Russia's capacity to continue its armed aggression, and damaging four warships at their fallback base is the naval form of that pressure.

On 12 August 2026, Ukraine targeted Russia's main Black Sea naval base and oil terminal at Novorossiysk overnight. Fires broke out at the port's oil and fleet facilities, two of Russia's largest grain terminals stopped work, and debris damaged homes across the city, according to Ukrainian monitoring channels and local Russian authorities. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy confirmed the operation hours later.

Kyiv calls it a "unique operation" on the fleet's last big base

Zelenskyy said Ukraine's Defense Forces hit the Novorossiysk naval base overnight on 12 August. The port city is situated more than 350 kilometers from the front line on Russia's eastern Black Sea coast. The Ukrainian president described the assault as a unique operation against the last main outpost of Russia's Black Sea Fleet.

"Our Palianytsia jet drones, Neptune missiles, and naval uncrewed systems precisely struck the designated targets," he said, adding that hits were confirmed on air-defense positions, piers, and seaport infrastructure.

Fires at the Sheskharis oil terminal and the naval harbor

Ukrainian drones hit the oil terminal and the naval base, the Ukrainian defense outlet Militarnyi reported. Its analysis of NASA satellite fire data placed blazes at the Sheskharis complex, where crude loads onto tankers, and near the naval base and fuel-storage tanks.

Sheskharis is the endpoint of Transneft's main pipelines and a key export point for Russian crude on the Black Sea. Novorossiysk ships 600,000 to 700,000 barrels of oil a day.

The Ukrainian monitoring channel Krymsky Veter said fires broke out near the Sheskharis pier and the military harbor where Black Sea Fleet ships and submarines dock. Russia moved vessels to Novorossiysk after Ukrainian strikes pushed the fleet out of occupied Crimea.

Two grain terminals stop at the world's top wheat exporter

Novorossiysk's two largest grain-handling terminals halted work after the strikes, Reuters reported, citing four industry sources. The world's top wheat seller, Russia sends most of its exports out through Black Sea ports.

The Novorossiysk grain terminal, which can move 8.5 million tons a year, halted work as owner Demetra Holding assessed the damage. NKHP, a terminal handling 7.1 million tons a year, also stopped, its main owner OZK said, adding that no one was hurt. The Ukrainian monitoring Telegram channel Exilenova+ described NKHP, Russia's largest deepwater grain terminal, as one of the sites hit.

The strikes extend Ukraine's effort to deny Russia the grain and oil revenue that funds the war, a mirror of Russia's own summer campaign against Ukraine's ports: as Moscow strikes Odesa's terminals to choke Ukrainian exports, Kyiv works to shut Russia's own.

Russia says its own drone debris damaged homes and killed two

Krasnodar Krai Governor Veniamin Kondratyev claimed several hundred drones attacked the region overnight and that falling debris struck 21 residential buildings and four enterprises in Novorossiysk. He claimed two people were killed, including an eight-year-old child, and 13 wounded across the krai, with about 90 residents moved to temporary shelters.

Novorossiysk Mayor Andrei Kravchenko claimed debris hit six residential buildings, a commercial building, and a construction site, and that there were casualties.

The Russian news Telegram channel Astra reported that a café burned on Sukhumskoye Shosse, across the road from the entrance to the Novorossiysk naval base. Astra also found that a strike damaged School No. 15 near the fleet's ship berths.

Part of a widening summer campaign

The strike fits a broader Ukrainian effort this summer to carry the war onto Russian soil and drain the Kremlin's ability to fight. A day earlier, Ukrainian drones set a Wildberries logistics complex ablaze near Voronezh and hit an oil refinery in Orsk. Overnight on 10 August, drones struck a petrochemical plant in Tobolsk and a refinery in Tatarstan.

Russia is changing the drones it attacks with, and hiding the ships it can no longer use. Russian forces are using more jet-powered drones in their air attacks, effectively betting on them, Ukrainian Navy spokesman Dmytro Pletenchuk said, according to UkrInform.

The shift is toward faster, harder-to-stop drones. Russia is reducing the number of ordinary drones and increasing the jet-powered ones, betting on them first and foremost.

Jet-powered Shaheds fly faster than propeller models, giving air defenses less time to react, and Russia has used them in recent strikes, including the 1 August attack that killed a warehouse worker at the retailer Rozetka. Ballistic missiles, Pletenchuk added, remain the main challenge.

The Black Sea Fleet no longer goes to sea

Russia also still claims control of waters it cannot use. The Russians believe they exercise operational control over the Black Sea, but if you look at it purely in terms of sea sorties, they are absent, Pletenchuk said.

"The Azov Sea is out of the question now, and the Black Sea, effectively, the same," he stressed.

Russian aviation remains present and is a problem because it allows Russia to at least map the situation and makes the sea dangerous, but the fleet itself has been driven from the water.

Russia is afraid to repair its own ships

The most striking detail is what has happened to ship maintenance. Russia has repair facilities in occupied Crimea, but does not dare enter and repair ships there, because it has already learned how such repairs end.

They end with the Navy and the Armed Forces adding the "final touches," he said, so Russia periodically tows ships between bays to keep them from being finished off. Novorossiysk has some repair capacity, but docking there is very risky because a ship under repair becomes a stationary target. In practice, no one does it there either. As for small craft like Raptor and Grachonok boats, they are caught during rotations to the occupied spits and destroyed when they come into view, he added, sometimes turning back mid-route, the only patrol vessels Russia still uses.

Ukrainian drone operators hit the S-400 Russian long-range air-defense battery in occupied Crimea overnight, Ukraine's Defense Intelligence (HUR) reported on 27 July. They burned a missile launcher and the radar that lets the system detect incoming aircraft and missiles, then published video of the strikes. 

The strike

Overnight on 25–26 July 2026, operators from HUR's Unmanned Systems Department tracked down a Russian S-400 Triumf system on the occupied peninsula. They set fire to its launcher and to the 96L6 radar that feeds it targeting data, the agency reported while sharing the footage. The S-400 is one of Moscow's high-value air-defense complexes.

The video first follows the point of view of a one-way attack UAV — a cheap drone built to crash into its target — as it approaches the parked launcher, the picture cutting out the instant it hits. A second drone films the blast from a distance. A third then lines up the system's radar.

Ukrainian units have torched S-400 radars and launchers on the peninsula before, part of a steady push against Russia's air cover, targeting long-, medium-, and short-range systems, different types of surveillance radar, and even the mobile fire groups — the drone-hunting squads with machine guns.

What the S-400 and its radar do

The S-400 Triumf is Russia's long- and medium-range air-defense system, built to shoot down aircraft, cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles. Depending on the missile it carries, it can engage aerodynamic targets up to 400 km away and ballistic targets up to 60 km with its 40N6E and 48N6 interceptors.

The wider squeeze on Crimea

The strike came amid a run of attacks tightening around the occupied peninsula. Overnight on 27 July, explosions were followed by power outages reported in at least Simferopol and Sevastopol. Fire broke out at a main substation in Bakhchysarai and near the Black Sea Fleet's 133rd separate logistics brigade close by.

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A night earlier, Ukraine's Defense Forces struck a Chornomornaftogaz gas facility near Vnukove and a relay station used to guide Russia's Geran and Gerbera long-range attack drones near Chornomorske.

Occupied Yalta stayed without power as of 26 July. In nearby Alushta and its villages, occupation authorities declared a state of emergency on 25 July after more than 48 hours of darkness, opening the door to cash compensation for residents. Yalta's occupiers instead set up so-called assistance centers where people can charge phones, power banks, and flashlights, under restrictions and video surveillance. Some residents complain that poor-quality fuel may be causing their generators to fail.

Striletska Bay near Sevastopol, once a key base for Russian warships in occupied Crimea, is now nearly empty and used primarily for mooring tugboats and small patrol craft, the Atesh partisan group reported on July 8.

According to the group, Russia now uses the bay mainly for maintenance work and rare anti-sabotage defense drills, having pulled most major vessels from the area.

"Recently, the bay has been practically empty... The degradation of the occupation fleet in Sevastopol is becoming increasingly obvious. Striletska Bay, which previously housed a large number of combat vessels, is now idle." Atesh said.

The remaining combat units are periodically rotated and redeployed in an apparent effort to avoid detection by Ukrainian reconnaissance.

"Every object is under control — no ship will go unnoticed," Atesh said, adding that all ship movements are being tracked and shared with the Ukrainian Armed Forces.

Sevastopol has served as the base for Russia's Black Sea Fleet since the illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014. Repeated Ukrainian attacks using naval drones, missiles, and long-range drones have forced the Kremlin to reduce its naval presence in occupied Crimea.

Ukraine has destroyed several Russian vessels, including the Caesar Kunikov landing ship, the Sergei Kotov patrol ship, the Ivanovets missile corvette, and multiple high-speed landing crafts.

The shrinking Russian presence in Sevastopol comes as Ukraine steps up drone attacks against other Black Sea Fleet locations. On July 6, drones struck the fleet's facilities in Novorossiysk, Krasnodar Krai, a key port east of Crimea across the Kerch Strait.

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The Kyiv IndependentVolodymyr Ivanyshyn