OPEN LETTER: To the Russian Black Sea Fleet—Neptune has found you, even in the bay

Sevastopol as the nerve center of Russia’s presence in Crimea

Sevastopol is not just a city. It is the very reason Putin annexed Crimea in 2014: the headquarters of the Black Sea Fleet, which had been leased to Ukraine since the dissolution of the USSR, and which the Kremlin never accepted losing. This geopolitical obsession with a naval base triggered a series of events that led to the most destructive war in Europe since 1945. It is here that we see the cost of an unresolved imperial complex.

Striletska Bay, in particular, is home to patrol boats, support vessels, and a logistics coordination center for the fleet. According to analyses by Crimean Wind and Militarnyi, it is a key operational facility for the maintenance and resupply of the ships that launch Kalibr missiles against Ukrainian cities. Destroying the weapons and equipment depots in this bay directly reduces Russia’s strike capability against Ukrainian civilians.

The Systematic Campaign to Weaken the Russian Fleet

The strike on June 11, 2026, is part of a methodical and extraordinarily effective campaign. Since 2022, Ukraine has destroyed or damaged approximately 33% of the Black Sea Fleet’s combat vessels—about twenty ships. In January 2026, Ukrainian Navy spokesperson Dmytro Pletenchuk confirmed that no Russian ships or submarines had been sighted in the Black Sea for more than a week. The fleet had taken refuge in Novorossiysk, 600 km from the front lines. Even there, it is not safe.

In December 2025, Ukrainian “Sub Sea Baby” underwater drones struck a Kilo-class submarine in Novorossiysk, penetrating multi-layered port defenses in what one analysis described as a feat deemed “impossible.” Ukraine is forcing military experts around the world to revise their analytical frameworks. This isn’t luck—it’s skill.

When people say that Ukraine is “holding on,” they’re missing the point. Ukraine is not in passive survival mode—it is in a mode of gradual reconquest. Every strike on the fleet, every refinery set ablaze, every depot destroyed says the same thing: we are turning your predicted victory into a documented disaster. The Black Sea is no longer your lake. It has once again become a contested space.

The decision-making framework behind each missile

I am addressing directly the Russian military decision-makers who authorized the deployment of weapons and equipment to these depots in Striletska. You knew that Crimea was a target. You knew that Ukraine had the capability to strike. And yet, you proceeded anyway. You pressed on because you had no choice—these depots are essential to maintaining your fleet’s operational capability. Every time a depot is destroyed, you must rebuild it, restock it, and protect it even more.

This vicious cycle—build, protect, rebuild—is exactly what the Ukrainian strategy seeks to create. Not total destruction, but systemic exhaustion. Every resource devoted to defending Crimea is a resource taken away from the front lines. Every air defense system deployed to protect Sevastopol is a system that isn’t protecting the troops in Pokrovsk or Sloviansk.

The logic of attrition and its human consequences

I do not celebrate death. No human being—not even an enemy—is a mere number in a column of casualties. But I am naming what this war objectively produces: a Russian state that sends its young people to die by the thousands, every day, for an imperial project that the majority of the international community condemns. According to Ukrainian data from June 30, 2026, Russian losses since the start of the war exceed 380,000 soldiers killed or put out of action.

These men are not just enemies. They are also victims of a regime that has decided to sacrifice a generation for a dream of empire. The best thing the West can do for these Russian soldiers, who are unaware of the true cost of their mission, is to help Ukraine win this war quickly. The longer it lasts, the heavier the toll on both sides.

I resist the temptation to dehumanize the enemy. It’s easy, comfortable, and strategically foolish. Understanding why Russian soldiers continue to fight despite catastrophic losses—indoctrination, fear, propaganda, despair—is essential to envisioning a way out of the war. Blind hatred is not a policy. It is an emotion that delays peace.

The Industrial Miracle Amid the Bombs

To those who manufacture Neptune missiles in workshops I cannot name, in cities I cannot reveal, under the threat of strikes deliberately targeting Ukraine’s industrial infrastructure: your work has destroyed the flagship of an imperial fleet. Your work has set Russian refineries ablaze hundreds of kilometers away. Your work is shifting the military balance in the Black Sea against the aggressor.

A year ago, Ukraine produced 70% of its new weapons domestically. Today, that figure stands at 90%, according to data from Euromaidan Press. More than 400 Ukrainian combat units have placed orders for over 500,000 drones and pieces of equipment via the Brave1 Market platform. This is not a war economy merely surviving—it is a war economy accelerating.

What the Striletska Strike Means for the Ukrainian Navy

The Ukrainian Navy had been virtually destroyed or captured at the start of the war. It has rebuilt itself around new doctrines: naval drones, coastal missiles, and precision strikes. In April 2026, an operation by SBU special forces struck three ships of the Russian fleet in Sevastopol, including landing craft. In June 2026, the Neptune strike on Striletska Bay continued this campaign of systematic degradation.

The Ukrainian Navy has rewritten the textbooks on naval warfare. It has demonstrated that a surface-less navy—one without large ships—can dominate a maritime space against a technologically superior adversary by combining drones, missiles, and intelligence. This lesson is being studied in Washington, Taipei, Tokyo, and in all military headquarters contemplating asymmetric maritime warfare.

There is a cruel irony in the fact that Ukraine, stripped of its navy by Russia in 2014, has developed asymmetric naval capabilities that are now a global benchmark. The theft of the Ukrainian fleet in Crimea created the vacuum that forced innovation. Putin may have confiscated the ships—but he could not confiscate the ingenuity of their engineers.

The Cost of Half-Measures

This letter is also addressed to Western leaders who continue to supply weapons to Ukraine with restrictions on their use, deadlines that defy common sense, and political ambivalence that is costing Ukrainian lives. Every restriction on deep strikes, every hesitation regarding long-range systems, every condition placed on the use of the weapons supplied—all of this has a name: passive complicity with the aggressor driven by short-term political calculations.

The strike on Striletska Bay was possible because the Neptune is a Ukrainian weapon, and Ukraine decides how to use it. Imagine what would be possible with full freedom of action for the longer-range systems supplied by the West. Ukraine is not asking the West to fight in its place. It is asking the West to stop hindering its ability to defend itself as effectively as it is capable of doing.

The Penza Precedent: Striking the Russian Military-Industrial Complex

On the night of June 30–July 1, 2026, Ukrainian forces struck the Scientific Research Institute of Physical Metrology in the city of Penza—a facility described by the Ukrainian General Staff as “a leading Russian company in the space, aerospace, and military engineering sectors.” This facility manufactured sensors for the Iskander, Kalibr, and Kh-101 missiles, as well as components for the Su-34, Su-35, and Tu-95MS military aircraft. Striking the production line of the missiles that are hitting Ukrainian cities—that is the very definition of a legitimate and effective military strategy.

This strike illustrates the shift in Ukraine’s strategy: no longer merely defending its territory, but targeting the adversary’s industrial capabilities. Using Ukrainian weapons, from Ukrainian territory, without the West having to assume political responsibility for the decision. The only thing the West should do is not put obstacles in the way.

The Western paradox strikes me every time I analyze it. We supply weapons to Ukraine so it can defend its sovereignty—and then we tell it how to use them. It’s both generous and condescending. Ukraine deserves its allies. It also deserves their full and complete trust in its military decisions.

Grains, Shipping Routes, and Food Security

The decline of the Russian Black Sea Fleet has a direct and global economic impact: the gradual reopening of shipping routes for Ukrainian grain exports. Ukraine is one of the world’s breadbaskets—the world’s third-largest wheat exporter before the war. Russia’s militarization of the Black Sea had threatened these exports, affecting global food prices and food security in dozens of net-importing countries.

Every Russian ship destroyed, every logistics depot in Sevastopol put out of commission, every air defense system in Crimea neutralized—all of this helps secure the maritime space that Ukrainian grain must traverse to feed part of the world. Ukraine’s naval victory is not merely geopolitical. It is humanitarian.

The Impact on Russian Expansionist Ambitions

The Black Sea served as a testing ground for Russia’s plan for territorial expansion southward. Controlling the sea meant controlling access to the Mediterranean, to Turkey, and to global trade routes. That plan has now been thrown into disarray. The Black Sea Fleet is holed up in Novorossiysk. It is being struck even there. Its operational activity has plummeted. The eight or nine ships capable of launching Kalibr missiles—each now poses an existential risk to the fleet if lost.

This strategic vulnerability is a direct result of Ukrainian resistance. It is altering Russian calculations not only in the Black Sea, but throughout the entire Mediterranean theater and beyond. A great power that loses control of its immediate maritime sphere is a great power whose imperial project is in retreat.

Ukrainian grain shipped across the Black Sea feeds families in North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. These families often do not realize that their daily bread depends in part on the Neptune missiles that keep the sea route open. The connections between a strike in Striletska Bay and a meal in Cairo are very real. The war in Ukraine is not just Ukraine’s war.

The Diplomacy of Destruction

Every strike on Crimea is not just military—it is diplomatic. It reminds Moscow that the occupied peninsula is not a permanent gain. It reminds the international community that Ukraine has not relinquished its sovereignty over this illegally annexed territory. It reminds potential negotiators that any peace agreement that does not include the return of Crimea will leave a Russian military platform in place within missile range of the Ukrainian coast.

Ukrainian Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov stated in June 2026 that Ukrainian drones were “turning Crimea into an island” by disrupting its land links, bridges, and logistical supply lines. This strategy of gradually isolating the peninsula reflects a clear vision: to make maintaining the occupation so costly that it becomes unsustainable for Russia.

The Neptune as a Tool for Symbolic Recapture

There is something deeply symbolic about the fact that the Neptune—born of Ukraine’s refusal to accept the loss of its navy after 2014—is now the instrument of maritime reconquest. This missile, named after the Roman god of the sea, strikes at the naval foundations of the Russian occupation from the Ukrainian coast. It is a form of military poetry that the engineers at the Luch Design Bureau likely did not foresee, but which they made possible through their perseverance.

The strike on Striletska Bay will not be the last. There will be others. The Neptune 2, co-developed with MBDA, will be more powerful, more precise, and have a longer range. The Black Sea will not be reclaimed in a single day. But it is being reclaimed—one base at a time, one ship at a time, one Russian military decision rendered impossible at a time.

I often think of the Ukrainian sailors captured or killed during the 2014 annexation, of those who had to watch their ships seized without being able to fight back. Of those who committed the affront of surrendering to the Russians to avoid death. The Neptune won’t bring them back. But it speaks on their behalf: you haven’t been forgotten, and this isn’t over.

What Your Calculations Have Produced

I am addressing Vladimir Putin directly. Not out of naivety—he won’t read this. But because assigning responsibility is an act in itself. You annexed Crimea in 2014 to secure your access to the Black Sea and assert the continuity of the Russian empire. Twelve years later, your Black Sea Fleet is hiding in Novorossiysk, its depots in Sevastopol are burning, its landing ships have been destroyed, and the Ukrainian missile that sank the Moskva is now being co-developed with Europe’s largest missile manufacturer to become even more powerful.

You sought to weaken Ukraine. You have created one of the most innovative and resilient military forces in the world. You wanted to divide the West. You have sparked the greatest movement toward transatlantic unity since the Cold War. You wanted to secure Sevastopol forever. You have turned Striletska Bay into a permanent target for the navy of a country you thought you could conquer in three days.

The Fundamental Miscalculation

The flaw in your plan, Mr. Putin, is the same as that of all empires that have underestimated the resistance of peoples who refuse to be annexed. You believed that Ukrainian identity was an artificial construct—“a single people,” as you wrote. You have sparked the most decisive war yet for the forging of a distinct and proud Ukrainian national identity. Every missile fired at Kyiv has created ten new Ukrainian patriots. Every soldier sent to die in the fields of the Donbas has forged ten new, legitimate hatreds against the occupation.

The strike on Striletska Bay speaks for itself: Russia can occupy, but it cannot secure. It can take, but it cannot hold without an ever-increasing and unbearable cost. The history of empires is the history of this truth. You are no exception.

I do not feel hatred for Vladimir Putin. I feel something colder and harder: a certainty. The certainty that his project has already failed in its most fundamental premises. Ukraine exists. It is resisting. It is striking back. It is innovating. And one day, whoever governs Russia after him will have to deal with the ruins of this failed imperial project.

The Momentum of Ukrainian Military Innovation

The strike on Striletska Bay is part of a trend of Ukrainian military innovation that shows no signs of slowing down. Ukraine now produces 90% of its new weapons domestically. It is co-developing systems with European partners such as MBDA. It is launching production of long-range drones in the Netherlands as part of the Build with Ukraine program. It has received 3.9 billion euros from the EU for its arms production—the first tranche of a 6-billion-euro program. This industrial momentum is a strategic reality that Moscow cannot ignore.

Deep strikes against Russian military industries—such as the one on the Penza Institute—complement the strategy of naval degradation in Crimea. Ukraine is simultaneously attacking Russian military capabilities at sea, on land, in the air, and deep within its industrial base. This is a strategy of total war waged by a country that, four years ago, did not have the means to even imagine it.

The Implications for the World Order

What Ukraine has been demonstrating since 2022—and what the Neptune strike on Striletska Bay illustrates—is that revisionist powers are not invincible. That technology, motivation, and international aid can compensate for inferiority in numbers and raw resources. That resistance is possible. This lesson matters not only for Ukraine, but for Taiwan, for the Baltic states, and for all countries living in the shadow of a neighbor with imperial ambitions.

China is closely watching what Ukraine is doing to Russia. Military strategists in Beijing are studying Ukrainian drones, Neptune missiles, strikes on refineries, and asymmetric naval operations. These lessons will find their way into their military doctrines. For better or for worse—depending on who applies them.

Taiwan, which may be reading this, is studying this conflict with existential concern. What Ukraine has developed—asymmetric defense, drones, coastal missiles—is exactly the kind of capabilities Taiwan would need if Beijing decided to take action. The war in Ukraine is not a local European event. It is a laboratory for modern warfare, and its lessons will have global implications.

The Invisible Work of Industrial Resistance

I want to conclude by talking about those we hear the least about. The technicians at the Luch Bureau who spent years designing, testing, and improving the Neptune. The factory workers who manufactured these missiles under the constant threat of Russian strikes. The navy soldiers who targeted Striletska Bay with a precision that speaks to a level of training, operational intelligence, and courage that words can barely capture.

We owe them several things. First, the truth: to tell what they have accomplished without sugarcoating or concealing it. Second, support: to continue funding, arming, and standing with Ukraine until justice is possible. And finally, remembrance: not to forget, once this war is over, the human and intellectual cost of this extraordinary resistance.

The Open Letter That Needs No Reply

This letter does not call for a response from the Russian fleet or the Kremlin. It does not expect one. It exists to name what is happening—with the clarity that reality deserves and that official rhetoric does not always provide. In Striletska Bay, on June 11, 2026, a Ukrainian missile hit its target. The aggressor’s weapons depots burned. And somewhere, in a workshop I cannot name, Ukrainian engineers knew that their work, once again, had made a difference.

That’s enough. That’s actually a lot. Military justice needs nothing more than that to keep going.

I don’t know when this war will end. I don’t know how it will end. No one really knows. What I do know is that men and women in Ukraine wake up every morning to design, build, and launch missiles that defend their freedom. And that the West, which created the international order that this war threatens, has no right to let them down.

Taiwan, Japan, and Maritime Asymmetry

Ukraine’s naval campaign is being studied by military headquarters around the world. Taiwan, which faces the threat of an amphibious invasion by China, is observing how Ukraine neutralized the Black Sea Fleet’s landing capabilities using drones and coastal missiles. Japan has sent personnel to NATO headquarters in Wiesbaden and is developing partnerships with Ukrainian drone companies. The Ukrainian model of asymmetric maritime warfare—a navy without large surface vessels that neutralizes a conventional fleet—is redefining military doctrines across half the globe.

What the Luch Design Bureau has built in Ukrainian workshops is becoming the benchmark for any power that must defend its coastline against a numerically superior naval adversary. This is an unintended contribution to global security that Ukraine is making at the cost of its own blood. Every Neptune missile that hits its target in Striletska Bay is also a message to Taipei, Tokyo, and Seoul: asymmetric resistance is possible, it works, and it deserves to be prepared for before it’s too late.

The Revisionist Axis: Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea

The naval campaign in the Black Sea cannot be analyzed in isolation from the global threat. The Iranian Shahed drones that Russia is launching by the thousands against Ukraine are a direct contribution to the Russian war effort. The Chinese electronic components in the Russian drones represent documented economic complicity. North Korea has sent soldiers to fight for Moscow. These connections form a revisionist axis that is simultaneously testing the strength of the Western order on multiple fronts.

Ukraine is holding this forward line for the entire West. Every Neptune strike on the depots in Sevastopol sends a message to strategists in Beijing, Tehran, and Pyongyang: organized, well-equipped resistance, backed by the West, can impose an unbearable cost on the aggressor. This message is invaluable. It deserves to be upheld through continued support for Kyiv.

China is watching. Iran is watching. North Korea is watching. They see Russia—their strategic partner—getting bogged down, losing its ships, and watching its depots burn. If Ukraine wins, the message is clear to all revisionists: aggression comes at a price that resistance can make unbearable. If Ukraine loses, the message is just as clear—but in the opposite direction. The outcome of this war will shape the geopolitics of the rest of the century.

What the Black Sea Will Say About This Era

In ten or twenty years, when historians write about this period, they will note the extraordinary transformation Ukraine has undergone in the naval sphere. They will note that the Black Sea Fleet, a symbol of Russian imperial power, was gradually neutralized not by a major navy, but by a combination of drones, urgently developed missiles, and an indomitable national will. They will note the strike on Striletska Bay as an episode in a campaign that redefined naval warfare for the 21st century.

And they will note, I hope, that the West has finally grasped what is at stake—not quickly enough, not strongly enough, but enough for Ukraine to survive and resist. This shared resilience will be the foundation of any security order worthy of the name in the decades to come. The letter I am writing today is also a letter to that future.

What I Want This Article to Achieve

I want this article to do one simple thing: to make visible what military reports render invisible—the human and political significance of every strike, every missile, every destroyed depot. I am not on the ground. I do not claim the authority of one who has witnessed it firsthand. But I do claim the authority of one who reads rigorously, thinks honestly, and refuses to treat the war in Ukraine as a mere geopolitical footnote. It is an existential struggle for a people. And it deserves to be written about in a way that does justice to what it truly is.

This letter is not that of a military expert or a career geopolitical analyst. It is that of an observer who refuses to be numbed by statistics and victory reports. Striletska Bay is burning. People have made this possible at the cost of real risks. The very least we can do is speak clearly about it.

From Striletska to Penza: A Coherent Strategy

The strike on Striletska Bay is part of a series of Ukrainian strikes on Russian military-industrial facilities that has evolved significantly since 2022. On the night of June 30–July 1, 2026, Ukrainian forces simultaneously struck the Penza Institute of Physical Metrology—a manufacturer of sensors for Russian ballistic and cruise missiles—and logistics depots in Kursk, Donetsk, and Kharkiv, as well as drone control stations and strategic bridges in the Donbas. This synchronization points to sophisticated operational planning.

Every night of strikes, Ukraine simultaneously targets multiple levels of the Russian war machine: equipment at the front, logistical infrastructure in the rear, and now industrial production capabilities deep within Russian territory. It is a three-tiered war being waged simultaneously—a level of operational sophistication that few armies in the world are capable of sustaining.

Destroyed Bridges and the Isolation of Crimea

During the same period, Ukrainian forces struck a road bridge over the Malyi Kalchyk River near Hranitne in the Donetsk Oblast, a railway bridge over the Tepla River in the Luhansk Oblast, and a logistics hub near Novoocheretuvate in the Donetsk Oblast. This destruction of transportation infrastructure reduces Russia’s ability to rotate troops, resupply ammunition, and transfer equipment—aligning with the strategy of isolating Crimea that Fedorov explicitly mentioned.

The strategic coherence of all these strikes is no coincidence. It reflects a clear Ukrainian doctrine: starve the enemy before striking it head-on. Cut the nerves before reaching the brain. Isolate before encircling. This is intelligent attrition warfare—and it is producing tangible results in terms of the rate of Russian advance, which has dropped from 16.65 km² per day in August 2025 to just 3.79 km² per day in June 2026.

Ukraine is waging war on three fronts simultaneously—the battlefield, Russian logistics, and the Russian war industry. Without Western aid in the form of weapons and funding, none of these three fronts would be possible. The next time a European minister hesitates to sign a check for Ukraine, I’d like him to look at this list of synchronized strikes and consider what his hesitation costs.

The Irresistible Logic of Gradual Recapture

The strike on Striletska Bay on June 11, 2026, is not an isolated event. It is the expression of an irresistible logic: Ukraine will not give up. Every documented strike, every destroyed depot, every ship sunk or damaged conveys the same message—that an illegal occupation and unprovoked aggression come at an increasing and systemic cost to the aggressor. This logic does not waver. It is accelerating.

The Black Sea is no longer Putin’s inland lake. Crimea is no longer an impregnable fortress. Sevastopol is no longer out of reach. And Neptune—the weapon born of defiance—continues to find its targets. This letter ends where it began: with the conviction that resistance has meaning, that precision is a form of justice, and that Ukraine deserves for the world to continue watching what it is accomplishing.

The Promise of Neptune 2

The promise of the Neptune 2, co-developed with MBDA, is more than just an industrial announcement. It is the promise that Ukraine will be armed to defend its peace, regardless of the outcome of future negotiations. An armed peace is infinitely better than a submissive peace. Stockholm has understood this. Ukraine has always known it.

The memorandum signed between MBDA and the Luch Design Bureau on June 16, 2026, to develop the Neptune 2 is a promise for the future. A next-generation Ukrainian missile, co-developed with European expertise, capable of striking farther, more precisely, and with a larger payload. This promise means that whatever happens in the coming months—ceasefire or not, negotiations or not—Ukraine’s military capabilities will continue to grow. Ukraine’s deterrence will be stronger tomorrow than it is today. And that is exactly how lasting peace is built: not on negotiated weakness, but on sufficient strength to make aggression no longer worthwhile.

By Maxime Marquette, columnist