Novorossiysk: Kyiv Names Four Damaged Russian Warships

Ukraine’s General Staff said an attack on the naval base in Novorossiysk, carried out overnight between August 11 and 12, 2026, damaged four warships of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. Novorossiysk is Russia’s largest port on the Black Sea and doubles as the fleet’s main base, so the strike also touches the export route that carries Russian oil and grain to the Mediterranean, markets whose prices are watched in Serbia as well, and it shows that this war is being fought more than 300 kilometers from the front line.

“Four warships of the Russian aggressor sustained damage of varying degrees,” the General Staff said in a statement, adding that the full extent of the damage is still being established.

Which ships were named

The Ukrainian military identified all four vessels:

• the frigate Admiral Makarov, Project 11356
• the frigate Admiral Essen, Project 11356
• the small missile ship Buyan-M, Project 21631
• the patrol ship Vasily Bykov, Project 22160

Both frigates and the Buyan-M carry Kalibr cruise missiles, the weapon Russia uses to strike targets deep inside Ukraine from the sea. That is why Kyiv singles these ships out from the rest of the fleet, and why a hit on them is treated differently than a hit on port infrastructure.

According to Ukraine’s account of the strike, the same wave also used Palianytsia jet drones, Neptune anti-ship missiles and naval drones. Besides the ships, the strike hit a 30N6E radar from an S-300 air defense battery, a mobile firing position at a second berth, the tunnel entrance of the oil storage facility at the Sheskharis terminal, and infrastructure at berths three, six and seven.

What happened in the city itself

Krasnodar region governor Veniamin Kondratyev said three people were killed, including an eight year old boy, while the number of wounded reported through the day ranged from ten to twenty four. Twenty one residential buildings and four commercial buildings were damaged, and a state of emergency was declared in Novorossiysk.

Three grain terminals in the port were hit, including facilities belonging to United Grain, Demetra and KSK, and their operations were temporarily suspended. Novorossiysk is one of the main points through which Russian wheat reaches world markets, so any disruption at this part of the Black Sea feeds into the calculations of buyers far from the war.

Why did Novorossiysk become the fleet’s main base?

Because Russia pulled part of its fleet out of occupied Crimea once Ukrainian strikes on ships and port infrastructure there turned into a regular occurrence. Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) said the enemy moved a significant share of its ships to Novorossiysk once it lost the ability to keep them safely in temporarily occupied Crimea. Novorossiysk went from a secondary port to the Black Sea Fleet’s main address, and with that status came a place on the target list.

Russian military officials have not confirmed the reports of ship damage. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty said it could not independently verify Ukraine’s claims, but that satellite images reviewed by Radio Svoboda show scorch marks in the technical zone that holds the submarine berths.

The day before, reports said only that Ukrainian drones had hit the port and that a boy had been killed. It was only with the General Staff’s statement that the story gained a list of targets hit and the ships’ names, the detail against which the Black Sea Fleet’s losses in a single night are actually measured. Russian authorities have so far released no damage assessment for the vessels.