Тhe Azov Sea is at a standstill, Ukrainian drone force commander says
The milestone marks a jump from the 201 reported in late July, though the pace has slowed as shipping traffic in the strike zone thinned out.
Yuri Zoria
September 22, 2026
Euromaidan Press
Operation MoLoChKa has now disabled 300 Russian shadow fleet ships in 11 weeks, SBS commander Robert “Madyar” Brovdi announced. The Unmanned Systems Forces (SBS) campaign has frozen the Azov Sea and the Kerch Strait, Brovdi said.
The Black and Azov seas have turned from Russian supply corridors into contested waters where Russia’s shadow fleet—the aging tanker armada it uses to evade oil sanctions—now moves at its own risk, according to the SBS.
134 in the Azov, 166 in the Black Sea
SBS drones struck 134 vessels in the Azov Sea and 166 in the Black Sea since Operation MoLoChKa began on 6 July, the SBS wrote—all, Brovdi specified, stripped of the ability to move under their own power. He called it the “300th fleet,” playing on the Ukrainian army’s code for a wounded man, and “a suitcase without a handle and a torment for the worm budget.”
The Azov Sea “stands and will stand, together with the Kerch Strait,” Brovdi said. The northern and northeastern Black Sea operates on what he called a “maybe we’ll slip through” gamble.
The 300-ship count is the latest in a rapid progression. The SBS reported 201 vessels disabled by 29 July—just three weeks into the operation—when Brovdi said Crimea’s supply route was “blocked indefinitely.” By 11 September, the tally had reached 285, with 215 struck in July, 54 in August, and 16 in the first 11 days of September. The pace slowed as traffic in the strike zone thinned out.
Commercial shipping retreating from Russian ports
In late August, MSC Mediterranean Shipping Co., the world’s largest container carrier, suspended new bookings for transport through the Russian port of Novorossiysk. Russia itself closed the Don-Azov shipping channel and the Kerch Strait in July after the opening wave of strikes.
By early August, Ukraine had turned Novorossiysk—Russia’s main Black Sea export gateway—into a chokepoint, and in mid-August Ukrainian forces struck four Russian warships there in a single night. A 141-meter vessel disappeared near Novorossiysk the same week.
A parallel campaign against Crimea’s power grid
The SBS is running a second operation alongside MoLoChKa. Operation Crimean Switch Off, also launched on 6 July, had struck 374 energy nodes across occupied Crimea and other occupied areas in eastern and southern Ukraine by 10 September. The campaign has blacked out Crimea on multiple nights. Brovdi has said the SBS could strike seven times more targets with faster funding.
Yuri Zoria is a journalist at Euromaidan Press and is a philologist by education, in 2003-2007 Yuri worked as a journalist in a Luhansk online media. He was born and lived all his life in the peaceful provincial city of Luhansk, where nothing serious happened. Until 2014. Now he is an IDP. Follow Yuri on twitter: @loogunda.