Ukrainian commandos raid the Boyko Towers.
Ukrainian protection ministry
Ukrainian commandos using in gun-armed rigid-hull inflatable boats raided two Russian-controlled oil platforms 25 miles east of Snake Island within the western Black Sea in a sequence of raids starting in late August.
The commandos in the end boarded the so-called “Boyko Towers” platforms, seized a radar and a few rockets and survived a gun run by a Russian Sukhoi Su-30 fighter-bomber. A Ukrainian missileer firing a man-portable anti-aircraft missile apparently broken the Sukhoi and compelled it to interrupt away.
Ukraine’s navy intelligence company characterised the raids as ensuing within the everlasting seize of the platforms—truly, “liberation” could be extra correct, as Russian forces seized the platforms from their Ukrainian house owners again in 2015. “For Ukraine, the operation of returning the drilling platforms had a strategic significance,” the intel company acknowledged.
But it’s extra correct to say the Ukrainians have denied—no less than for now—the Russian exploitation of the platforms for navy functions. There’s a very good likelihood neither nation absolutely can management the platforms except and till the stability of energy within the Black Sea considerably shifts.
That, nonetheless, is a form of win for Ukraine. In dismantling Russia’s defensive structure within the western Black Sea, Ukraine is making it increasingly more harmful for the surviving vessels of the bottled-up Russian Black Sea Fleet to function wherever close to the Ukrainian coast with any diploma of confidence.
At the identical time, Kyiv’s forces are also making a zone of relative security by means of which grain ships can sail to and from Odesa or Ukraine’s ports on the Danube River. “Deprived of surveillance equipment stationed on these towers, Russia loses the capability to fully control the Black Sea waters,” the intel company acknowledged.
After capturing the 2 oil platforms in 2015, the Russians moved them nearer to the Ukrainian coast—and put in surface-search radars in addition to help tools for helicopters. The platforms functioned as naval sensor outposts with a secondary function of refueling and rearming assault helicopters.
Think of the Boyko Towers as the center hyperlink in a sequence of Russian naval installations stretching from occupied Crimea with its wonderful ports by means of the western Black Sea to Snake Island, which lies astride the principle grain-shipping route 80 miles south of Odesa.
Russian forces captured Snake Island on the primary day of Russia’s wider struggle on Ukraine in late February 2022—and held it till final summer season, when a mixed power of Ukrainian commandos, fighter-bomber pilots, drone crews and long-range howitzer gunners ejected the Russians from the tiny treeless island.
Today neither aspect retains troops on Snake Island, though it’s possible the Ukrainians have higher freedom of motion to and from the island. The identical consequence is probably going for the Boyko Towers.
The massive, largely motionless oil rigs are straightforward targets for anti-ship missiles, armed drones, helicopters and fighter-bombers. If both aspect tries completely to occupy the platforms, there’s little or no stopping the different aspect from placing the platforms—and making their garrisons very sad.
Consider what a sextet of U.S. Navy destroyers did to 2 oil platforms Iranian forces had been utilizing as staging bases within the Persian Gulf in 1988. Amid escalating Iranian assaults on delivery by means of the Gulf, the American ships surrounded the platforms, shrugged off some half-hearted defensive gunfire after which blasted the platforms into burning hulks.
White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater hilariously known as the fiery destruction of the platforms a “measured response.”
The Boyko Towers are not any much less susceptible. When, throughout the identical 1987-1988 conflict with the Iranians, U.S. forces tailored a pair of oil-support barges into lightly-defended commando bases, the barges’ crews complained they had been being “hung out to dry.”
There’s no compelling cause for Kyiv to hold any of its personal troops out to dry by stationing them on the Boyko Towers. What issues is that the Russians can’t use the platforms to impede the circulate of grain from Ukrainian ports north and west of the oil platforms—or use them to detect Ukrainian navy’s explosive-laden drone boats as they’re infiltrating the Black Sea Fleet’s ports in Crimea.
To these ends, it’s victory for the Ukrainians merely to maintain the Russians off the oil rigs—even when they’ll’t themselves completely garrison the identical rigs.
