Odessa proposed to be used as a US Navy base to contain Russia
Kyiv, December 02 (Navigator, Vladimir Mikhailov) – Ukraine urgently needs to create a new navy to counter Russia’s plans.
Speaking about this at the round table “Ukrainian South: modern challenges and strategic
development priorities,” said Andrey Klimenko, member of the supervisory board of the Maidan of Foreign Affairs Charitable Foundation.
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“40 new battle flags will be awarded in Crimea in the near future. Battle flags are awarded to units of the “regiment” and “brigade” types, which are 40*2000 military personnel. Thus, another 40 thousand military personnel will be added to the 35-80 thousand that are already there. In the next year or two, the Russian Black Sea Fleet will receive 4-6 ships of the corvette and frigate type, and 4-6 new, modern submarines.
Crimea, where I have lived almost my entire life, is not just turning into a military base, it is turning into a military base that never existed there. It is turning into a multifunctional military base, an integrated, self-sufficient group. Previously, there had never been coastal-based anti-ship missiles there, and many of the other elements, military branches and everything else that are there now.
Why is everyone against whom is all this? The answer is clear. It is possible that if the conflict in Donbass enters some more latent form there, then the Mistral will come to the Black Sea. Russia today has, after the Bulgarian brothers repaired the Caesar Kunikov, 7 large landing ships of the Black Sea Fleet, plus 3-4 other Russian fleets that constantly hang out here.
Each large landing ship is a battalion-tactical group with 10-12 tanks or 20 floating armored personnel carriers, which means that they cover all 6-7 landing areas that we have from Izmail to Skadovsk.
The cruise season in Odessa was a failure without any war. Simply because insurance companies did not advise cruise operators to go to Odessa, well, some did, at their own risk. Imagine that an incident occurs - a foreign ship, which is heading to Odessa, Ilyichevsk or Nikolaev, is blown up by a mine. Or there is sabotage on a ship, something explodes, I assure you that even without landing or naval operations, all or most of Ukraine’s exports and imports will cease, and today all of Ukraine’s exports and imports are maritime. Provided that Mariupol and Berdyansk are almost completely excluded from this entire transit or export-import turnover, it will cease to exist. Or a Russian warship stands opposite the entrance to the port of Ilyichevsk or the port of Odessa, or the Dnieper Bug estuary. It will have the same effect.
Therefore, it is impossible to do without a serious attitude towards the security sector and the formation in the south of Ukraine of a very powerful modern defensive region, including all types of armed forces. But today we don’t have a Ukrainian Navy, they simply don’t exist. We have one frigate, one obsolete landing ship that we don't need, and one minesweeper. There are three more boats - a missile boat and two artillery boats. All. Everything else is auxiliary vessels. One “Sagaidachny” is under 20 years old, he was born in 93. Everything else is old, there is no point in restoring it.
We need to build. We need a large-scale program for the construction of the Ukrainian fleet and the creation of a powerful system of coastal defense and territorial defense as its element along the entire length, from Izmail to Skadovsk. We need to build a serious defense in Kherson. There should be a special program for those four districts of the Kherson region that are adjacent to the administrative border of occupied Crimea, taking into account the fact that tens of thousands of Crimean Tatars live there. And people will leave Crimea, emigration will continue, and something needs to be done there too.
Over the past two weeks, I have talked a lot with military sailors at the level of ship commanders, these are the same captain-lieutenants who withdrew parts of their crews from Crimea, and today they are in Odessa, Ochakov, etc. They tell me: “you know, during various social upheavals in Odessa, our sailors and officers took off their military uniforms, walked in civilian clothes and participated.” And it seems to me that in order to maintain the morale of the citizens of Ukraine, even the very presence of a person in a naval uniform on the streets of these cities is a powerful psychological factor. Ours are here, for our citizens, etc.
As one famous British admiral said, if you don’t control the sea, the enemy controls it. Look what the shelf looks like today. The Odessa field, where the so-called Boyko towers stand, is a little closer to the coast of the Odessa region than to the coast of Crimea. There was one Russian missile boat there. And they are producing, and are going to drill 5 new wells at the Odessa field, and increase the production of gas, which they stole from us, from 2 billion to 2 billion next year. So, if we had a couple of ships of the appropriate class that would stand next to each other, I assure you, this ship would not go to this tower.
We need to build ships today, because it is expensive to buy, we also need to ask today, on the Lend-Lease principle, from the Americans, the Scandinavians, and the Germans, who have them, we need to have a fleet of 18-20 multi-purpose warships, who are able to withstand the threat. We need ships armed, relatively speaking, with the Harpoon missile, against which the cruiser Moskva, great, terrible and terrible, is nothing. It can only shoot down at a level of 5 meters above the water, and it flies at a level of several centimeters. All this should be based in Skadovsk, Odessa, Izmail, maybe we need to think about the Danube Flotilla in some form, all this should be produced at the Nikolaev factories, and at the Lenin Forge, which built corvettes, not to mention boats. And we need to persuade our NATO allies, while all this is happening, so that they constantly keep here, as they have done all this year since the beginning of the Crimean crisis, a small squadron of their ultra-modern ships.
I consider the presence of an American frigate with Harpoon missiles and those anti-missiles that shoot down Russian ballistic missiles during takeoff as the best guarantee of investment in the region at the present time. We have no other guarantees. When an American Arleigh Burke-class destroyer regularly comes to visit you on a raid in Odessa, in the eyes of a foreign investor, this will be the best guarantee of investment, believe me,” concluded Klimenko.
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