In April 2025, the Russian state announced a plan to revitalize its Navy with an 8 trillion-ruble ($ 100 billion) investment in modernizing and upgrading its fleet. Russian President Vladimir Putin reportedly has a deep personal interest and passion for the Russian fleet, which — like past Russian autocrats — he sees as a pivotal symbol of Russia’s status as a Great Power. Despite the promise of a massive cash infusion, the source of these funds is difficult to identify, as the Russian state is currently facing severe economic constraints. The challenges confronting the Russian Navy are far deeper and more multifaceted, involving not only financing, but also industrial capacity, adequate manpower, and major difficulties stemming from geography and conflicting strategic demands.
Systemic Challenges
The Russian Navy should not be thought of as a cohesive whole, nor should Russia be considered a historical naval power in the traditional sense. Russia is first and foremost a land power, and geography dictates that its navy functions as four (sometimes five) largely semi-independent entities: the Baltic, Northern, Black Sea, and Pacific Fleets, plus the isolated Caspian flotilla. Geography makes it extremely time-consuming to move ships between the Baltic and the Pacific. The Caspian flotilla is completely cut off, operating in the landlocked Caspian Sea. Only the Black Sea Fleet can reliably count on ice-free ports year-round. Even with climate change, most of the Russian Navy remains icebound in harbor for several months each year. This geographic dispersion means that the onshore facilities needed to maintain and build ships are also widely scattered.
A major legacy of the USSR is that the most capable shipbuilding facilities — especially large drydocks — were heavily concentrated in Mykolaiv, Ukraine, during the Soviet period. Soviet naval planners had decided that the ability to build and operate in the milder year-round climate of the Black Sea more than compensated for the region’s strategic isolation. The largest facilities that remained under Russian control after the USSR’s dissolution are located in Murmansk, north of the Arctic Circle. While these have proven adequate for building nuclear submarines and maintaining some large vessels, operating in the Arctic Circle places enormous strain on both personnel and equipment.
There is no fixed universal ratio, but it is generally accepted that ships require significant time in dock for repairs and maintenance between deployments in order to operate at maximum efficiency. In larger navies such as the US Navy, the rough ratio is often described as one ship at sea, one in maintenance/dry dock, and one in training. Lack of sufficient maintenance and training can have catastrophic consequences — a point dramatically illustrated by the 2022 sinking of the cruiser Moskva. On paper, the Moskva should have been more than capable of dealing with two Neptune anti-ship missiles. In reality, poor maintenance had left her radar inoperable, rendering her unable to detect or intercept the incoming threat. The Moskva also became a microcosm of another fundamental Russian Navy deficiency: manpower.
Fielding a high-quality fleet requires highly trained personnel with many years of service and experience. Russia produces officers through naval academies in Kaliningrad, St. Petersburg, and Vladivostok; students graduate after five years with a full higher education and begin their careers as lieutenants. The curriculum includes time at sea as seaman apprentices, essentially serving as enlisted sailors — an essential experience. Like the rest of the Russian armed forces, the Navy relies heavily on conscription. Russian naval conscripts serve 12-month terms, receiving only four to six weeks of training before deployment. Nominally, conscripts are intended to serve in shore facilities or on ships undergoing yard time, but the demands of the war in Ukraine have seen many pressed into sea service. The majority of Russia’s skilled enlisted specialists are career contract sailors. However, their valuable skill sets (machinery operation, radar, electronics, etc.) have led to many being reassigned to frontline support roles in Ukraine — or, in the case of conscripts, even to infantry battalions. As a result, the Russian Navy is critically short of skilled sailors and skilled civilian shipyard workers. Any attempt to expand recruitment will be undermined by the Army’s even more pressing need for manpower. Even after some form of peace is reached, skilled workers and technicians will remain in extremely high demand across other branches of service and the civilian economy, due to the massive exodus of such personnel from Russia and the widespread shortage of technical skills.
The Strategic Dilemma
Despite its many deficiencies, Russia remains capable of building ships — but the types of ships it can realistically build and sustain are not those required for a truly global (blue-water) naval presence. Naval operations are commonly divided into three categories: brown-water, green-water, and blue-water.
Brown-water navies operate primarily in inland waterways (rivers, estuaries, deltas), typically using small patrol boats and gunboats. Green-water navies can operate effectively in coastal waters and somewhat beyond the 12-mile limit. It is precisely this green-water capability that Russia can realistically build and maintain. Examples include the relatively modern Admiral Gorshkov-class frigates and the smaller, less heavily armed Karakurt— and Buyan-class corvettes. These vessels are well-suited to Russia’s needs: they function primarily as coastal patrol and defense ships, working in close cooperation with land-based radar, coastal missile batteries, and aviation.
Green-water ships have relatively small crews, shorter range, and less complex systems, yet are still capable of long transits between theaters (Pacific and Baltic, for example). Blue-water navies, by contrast, require large, powerful vessels able to operate independently anywhere in the world — destroyers, cruisers, aircraft carriers, and ocean-going frigates capable of global power projection.
Russia has long aspired to maintain blue-water capabilities, despite being much better suited to — and more realistically capable of sustaining — a green-water fleet.
For years, the Russian Navy has poured enormous resources into preserving prestige vessels such as the nuclear-powered battlecruiser Pyotr Velikiy and its sole aircraft carrier, Admiral Kuznetsov. Both ships have been massive drains on resources with little operational return. The Pyotr Velikiy has consumed huge amounts of funding and yard time for little more than the prestige of being able to say Russia still fields a battlecruiser. The Kuznetsov has launched a handful of widely televised (and frequently towed) sorties, conducted strategically meaningless airstrikes in Syria before evacuating its air wing to land bases due to unspecified problems, and has been laid up since 2018 after a catastrophic accident in which the floating drydock PD-50 sank beneath it. The drydock — purchased from Sweden in 1980 and already problematic — was being used because Russia lacked any other facility large enough to handle the carrier. A pump failure caused a 70-ton crane to collapse onto the Kuznetsov, inflicting possibly irreparable structural damage.
Despite serious problems with its surface fleet, Russia retains a meaningful strategic advantage in its ability to produce and maintain a sizable submarine force. Submarines are more compact than surface ships, require smaller crews, and have fewer complex weapons systems to coordinate. They are tactically flexible; ballistic-missile variants can launch both nuclear and conventional munitions, and Russia produces both diesel-electric and nuclear-powered types with considerable range. However, the conventional Kalibr cruise missiles that have been the mainstay of Russian submarine strikes have become increasingly rare since the escalation of the Ukraine conflict. Like the Kuznetsov’s ineffectual sorties, ballistic-missile submarine operations have been very limited. The submarine Krasnodar’s 2022 strike on Vinnytsia, which killed 23 civilians, consumed valuable and increasingly irreplaceable Kalibr missiles. Submarines cannot easily switch to the cheaper, cruder drones and rockets that Russia increasingly relies on, as they are designed for precision warfare. Thus, while nuclear-armed submarines remain a credible deterrent and potential instrument of asymmetric warfare (e.g., targeting undersea cables), they have very little utility in Russia’s current land war in Ukraine.
Sea Dominance
Having outlined the structural and strategic challenges, it is worth noting that Russia’s war against Ukraine has become a striking case study in how a smaller power can achieve maritime deterrence — and perhaps even localized dominance — over a much larger one. Ukraine never possessed a sizable fleet and lost its main naval base plus many valuable units during the 2014 annexation of Crimea. Yet since the 2022 full-scale invasion, Ukraine has sunk or severely damaged 15−16 Russian ships and repeatedly struck Sevastopol dockyards. These actions have denied Russia the ability to conduct amphibious landings along the Ukrainian coast or to use its navy in any meaningful offensive role since 2023. The Russian Black Sea Fleet can now more accurately be described as a flotilla, with a major portion of its remaining forces relocated to Novorossiysk in an effort to escape Ukrainian strikes.
Ukraine’s success is partly due to the poor material condition of the Russian fleet (as evidenced by the Moskva sinking, enabled largely by inoperable radar and air defenses). But it is also the result of innovative and highly effective use of drones and missiles against large, relatively static targets. Ukraine’s launch platforms for missiles and drones are small, highly mobile, and difficult to locate. The country has continued to innovate, deploying unmanned surface vessels such as the Sea Baby — compact craft no larger than small boats, with operational ranges up to 1,000 km. Originally developed as suicide craft, many now carry missile payloads, dramatically increasing their lethality. At roughly $ 200,000 each and built largely from commercial off-the-shelf components, these drones can be produced in multiple variants far more quickly than Russia can replace its losses.
Ukraine has recently expanded its operational scope in the Black Sea to aggressive offensive operations deep in Russian waters. On December 15, 2025, Ukraine struck the submarine Krasnodar in Novorossiysk harbor using a new variant of submersible drone — demonstrating that even retreat to protected harbors no longer guarantees safety. This follows a series of strikes against Russian-affiliated tankers used for sanctions-evading oil exports and has prevented Russia from imposing any effective blockade on Ukraine.
Investment to What End?
It remains highly questionable whether Russia will actually carry out its announced $ 100 billion naval investment, and even more questionable whether any partial effort at revitalization can overcome the systemic challenges across its entire economy and defense industry. It is unclear whether Russia possesses the industrial base to rebuild a blue-water fleet — or even to sustainably maintain a green-water one.
In his address on the subject, President Putin presented the investment as a commitment to long-running fleet modernization, major expansion of shipbuilding capacity, continued emphasis on nuclear capabilities and submarine development, and investment in new drone technology. Yet «modernization» can include continuing extremely expensive projects such as returning the battlecruiser Admiral Nakhimov to service while the Pyotr Velikiy undergoes repairs.
While Russia will likely spend a significant portion of any available funds on expanding green-water capabilities, the current regime remains intensely conscious of — and sensitive to — its perceived great-power status. Russia has a long historical pattern of rulers embracing wasteful naval construction precisely because a large blue-water navy is seen as a necessary mark of great-power standing.
Ukraine has demonstrated that the future of naval warfare may lie in asymmetric, disposable, mass-producible systems such as drones. Russia’s focus, however, remains — at minimum — on producing surface ships and submarines that have shown strikingly limited utility in the current conflict.
Whatever path Russia ultimately chooses — whether continuing to fund prestige «white elephants» (battlecruisers, a new carrier) or shifting more heavily toward green-water capabilities — the planned investment is almost certainly insufficient to arrest the decline of Russia’s ability to build, maintain, and crew its existing fleet, let alone bring significant numbers of new hulls online. Shortages of skilled workers, advanced components, and financial resources are being felt across the entire Russian defense industry and economy. By the nature of its geography, Russia will remain primarily a land power. Even if the Navy receives substantial attention in the coming years (which seems increasingly unlikely given Russia’s deteriorating overall position), it will be in direct competition with the land and air forces — both of which have suffered enormous losses of capability and personnel.
In short, as with much of the Russian military, the war against Ukraine has brutally exposed and greatly accelerated pre-existing weaknesses. Any increased naval spending will be unable to remedy those weaknesses through capital infusion alone. A genuine, comprehensive reconstruction of the Russian economy would be required — and that appears highly improbable as long as the current regime continues its self-destructive policies.
