Neptune Missiles Sank the Moskva From This Coast

The coast west of Odesa runs low and sandy, dune grass and scrub pine over limestone bluffs.

Somewhere along this shoreline on the evening of April 13, 2022, a Ukrainian coastal missile battery of the 25th Coastal Artillery, using the domestically developed R-360 Neptune anti-ship system, was radar-tracked onto a large surface contact about 120 kilometers south.

The contact was the Slava-class guided-missile cruiser Moskva, flagship of the Russian Navy Black Sea Fleet, the same ship that had demanded the surrender of Snake Island seven weeks earlier.

The battery fired two missiles at low altitude over the sea, forty seconds apart.

The Neptune is a subsonic sea-skimmer with a 150-kilogram warhead, developed by the Luch Design Bureau in Kyiv from 2013 as Ukraine's answer to the Russian domination of the Black Sea.

April 13 was the first time it was used in combat.

Both missiles struck the Moskva amidships on the port side, defeating a Slava-class defensive suite designed for the anti-ship threats of the 1980s and never seriously upgraded.

Fires reached the missile magazines.

The crew abandoned ship overnight.

Under tow the next morning in worsening weather, the Moskva capsized and sank in about two thousand meters of water.

Russia acknowledged one sailor killed and twenty-seven missing; Ukrainian and independent estimates put the crew losses substantially higher.

The Moskva was the largest warship lost in combat since the Falklands War, and the first Russian flagship sunk in action since the pre-dreadnought Knyaz Suvorov went down at Tsushima in 1905.

Its loss forced the Russian Black Sea Fleet to pull surface combatants back toward the Crimean coast and dropped a large hole in the fleet's air defense coverage.

Within weeks Ukrainian sea drones and additional Neptune strikes would begin working the same water.

Two years later, more than a third of the fleet's combat surface vessels had been damaged, destroyed, or forced from Sevastopol to safer bases on the Russian mainland.

The launch site itself is not publicly marked, for operational reasons that have not yet expired.

Odesa's naval museum has, since 2023, held a scale model of the Moskva mounted alongside a Neptune canister marked with the strike date.

The Black Sea has been an old contest for a very long time.

On the evening of April 13, 2022, a Ukrainian shore battery closed one round of it.