Russia appointed a new commander of the Black Sea Fleet, Serhiy Pintsyuk, the Russian Defense Ministry said on Tuesday, while Ukraine recorded a number of successes in the area despite Moscow’s numerical superiority, AFP and Agerpres reported.

The same source also confirmed the appointment by presidential decree of Admiral Oleksandr Moiseyev as commander of the Russian fleet instead of Mykola Yevmenov, who had been in the position since May 2019.

Moiseyev was already seen in his new role at a ceremony held in mid-March in the northwestern port of Kronstadt.

During a telephone meeting with the General Staff of the Armed Forces, Defense Minister Serhiy Shoigu announced the “appointment of Vice Admiral Serhiy Pinchuk as commander of the Black Sea Fleet,” his press service said in a statement on Tuesday.

According to his biography published on the ministry’s website, Pintsyuk was born in 1971 in Sevastopol, in Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula annexed by Russia in 2014. In 2011, he was promoted to commander of the Novorossiysk Naval Base in the Black Sea, and in 2016 he transferred command of the Caspian Fleet.

This change in the leadership of the Russian fleet in the Black Sea followed a series of Ukrainian successes in the area, carried out with the help of drones and sea-based missiles, which forced Russian ships to withdraw.

These attacks allowed Ukraine to sink or damage many Russian ships and reopen a sea corridor for the export of its grain.

Among its successes since the start of the conflict, Ukrainian forces bombed the headquarters of the Russian Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol in September 2023, more than a year after the sinking of the Moscow, the flagship of the Russian fleet, in the spring of 2022.

Ukraine claims to have sunk a third of its Black Sea fleet

In the more than two years since the start of the Russian invasion, Ukraine has achieved several major successes against the Russian fleet in the Black Sea, allowing the re-establishment of a shipping route for Ukrainian grain exports, despite Russian bombing threats.

In early February, the Ukrainian military announced that about a third of Russian warships had been “disabled” in the area.

Ukrainian forces claim to have destroyed 26 Russian ships since Moscow launched a full-scale invasion in February 2022.

The strikes are humiliating for Russia, which has been forced to move ships from its Sevastopol naval base in Crimea, a peninsula it illegally annexed in 2014, to the port of Novorossiysk further east.

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu recently called for “intensified training” and increased weapons to repel Ukraine’s attacks on the Black Sea Fleet.

“It is necessary to conduct daily training with personnel. Training to repel air and drone attacks,” Shoigu said. He also ordered the installation of additional firearms, large-caliber systems to destroy Ukrainian drones.

Russia’s failures in the Black Sea stand in stark contrast to its land offensive in eastern Ukraine, where its forces have advanced in recent months after more than a year of attrition.

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