A fire onboard a Russian spy ship off the coast of Syria has underlined the poor state of the Russian navy as its toehold in the Mediterranean hangs in the balance, analysts and western security services say.
The 55-year-old Kildin got into trouble off the Syrian coast last Thursday, when flames and thick black smoke could be seen billowing from its funnel and it hoisted two black balls up its mast, signifying that the crew no longer had control of the vessel.
The ship notified a nearby Togolese-flagged cargo freighter, the Milla Moon, that it was unable to steer and warned it to stay at least 2km away. The Russian crew assembled on the Kildin’s aft deck and uncovered the lifeboats, but did not ask for help, and after five hours fighting the fire the Kildin restarted its engines and got under way again.
According to western security services, the ship was in the eastern Mediterranean to monitor events in Syria after the fall in December of the Moscow ally Bashar al-Assad, as the Russian navy began to move military equipment out of the part of the Tartus port it controls.
The western sources argued that the Kildin fire, after another blaze two months earlier on the Russian missile frigate the Admiral Gorshkov, revealed Russia’s maritime presence in the area to be in a state of disrepair and disarray. They said that, at the same time that the Kildin was in distress, two other Russian naval vessels, the landing ships Ivan Gren and the Aleksandr Otrakovsky were also adrift temporarily without control of navigation.
Michael Kofman, an expert on the Russian military at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said that mishaps on Russian naval vessels were nothing new, and not confined to the Mediterranean.
“The Russian navy has historically struggled with maintenance and readiness issues. Fires are not uncommon. Operations are undoubtedly taking a toll on an ageing Russian fleet, which lacks sufficient maintenance and support facilities,” Kofman said.
Those problems could become much more severe if the new rulers in Damascus, the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), deprive Russia of the use of the Tartus base. So far, Moscow has kept a toehold in post-Assad Syria, at Tartus and the Khmeimim airbase, but the new government’s longer-term intentions are unclear in regard to the forces that helped keep the Assad regime in power for decades.
Last week, the HTS cancelled a 2019 contract with a Russian company, ending its control of the Tartus commercial port, which Moscow had hoped would be a $500m hub for exporting Russian agricultural products to the wider Middle East. That was a bad omen for the naval base, said Sidharth Kaushal, a senior research fellow on sea power at the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi) in London.
“The cancellation of the commercial arrangement is the writing on the wall for the navy, given how hand-in-hand the commercial and the strategic positions were,” Kaushal said.
The loss of Tartus would turn chronic problems in the Russian fleet into a crisis, he argued.
“The Russian navy, post cold war, wasn’t really built for endurance,” Kaushal said. “They built smaller vessels that they could build more rapidly, and packed them very heavily with missiles. That is very useful if you’re defending your own coastal waters but [over longer distances] the smaller the vessel, the more acute the maintenance problems.”
He added: “This is, and always has been, an issue for the Russians, but the issue will become much more significant in light of the potential loss of Tartus.”
Moscow is looking for alternatives in the Mediterranean, but all the options are problematic, according to a Rusi paper this month by Kaushal and Cmdr Edward Black, a former Royal Navy mine clearance diving officer now a visiting fellow at the institute.
Algeria is a longstanding Russian ally, but Moscow’s activities in Mali, where Wagner group mercenaries prop up a military junta, have driven a wedge between the two countries.
In Sudan’s civil war, Russia switched allegiances last year from the Rapid Support Forces to the Sudan Armed Forces, in a move most observers believe to be aimed at securing the use of Port Sudan on the Red Sea. However, access from there to the Mediterranean is dependent on use of the Suez canal, and negotiations with the Sudanese authorities have floundered.
A third option would be eastern Libya, where two ports, Tobruk and Benghazi, are under the sway of a Russian-backed general, Khalifa Haftar, and there are already an estimated 2,000 Russian mercenaries in the region.
A Russian base in Libya is the most likely alternative to Tartus, the Rusi study suggests, but it pointed out that it would make Russia’s ailing Mediterranean fleet a hostage to Haftar and his future choice of allies, and is therefore fraught with political risk for Moscow.
