• The Russian navy’s Black Sea Fleet has been forced to rebase almost all of its combat-ready warships from occupied Crimea to other locations. 
• Ukraine has dealt heavy blows to Russian forces in the Black Sea even as Russia has the upper hand on land.
• Vice-Admiral Oleksiy Neizhpapa, Ukraine’s navy chief, said the expected delivery of U.S.-made F-16 fighter aircraft would allow Ukraine to challenge Russia’s “full dominance” of the skies over the Black Sea.

The Russian navy’s Black Sea Fleet has been forced to rebase nearly all its combat-ready warships from occupied Crimea to other locations, and its main naval hub is becoming ineffectual because of attacks by Kyiv, Ukraine’s navy chief said.

Vice-Admiral Oleksiy Neizhpapa said Ukrainian missile and naval drone strikes had caused heavy damage to the Sevastopol base, a logistics hub for repairs, maintenance, training and ammunition storage among other important functions for Russia.

“They were established over many decades, possibly centuries. And clearly they are now losing this hub,” Neizhpapa told Reuters in a rare interview in the port city of Odesa ahead of Ukraine Navy Day on Sunday.

UKRAINE’S ARMY RETREATS FROM POSITIONS IN STRATEGIC TOWN AS RUSSIAN TROOPS CLOSE IN

More than 28 months since Russia’s full-scale invasion, Kyiv has dealt a series of stinging blows to Moscow in the Black Sea although Ukrainian ground troops are on the back foot across a sprawling front.

Ukraine, which has no major warships at its disposal, has used uncrewed naval boats packed with explosives to target Russian vessels, and pounded the fleet’s facilities and other military targets on Crimea with Storm Shadow and ATACM missiles.

“Almost all the main combat-ready ships have been moved by the enemy from the main base of the Black Sea Fleet, and the ships are kept in Novorossiisk, and some of them are kept in the Sea of Azov,” he said.

Russia’s Novorossiisk naval base on its eastern Black Sea coast lacks the extensive facilities of Crimea’s Sevastopol, which served as the storage and loading site for cruise missiles used by its warships to launch air strikes on Ukraine, he said.

“I understand that they are now trying to solve this problem in Novorossiisk,” he said, describing this as a “main issue” for the fleet.

Russia’s defense ministry did not respond to a Reuters request for comment on Neizhpapa’s remarks.

President Vladimir Putin told navy chiefs last month that Russia’s fleet had been replenished over recent years and that a major modernization was under way, including steps to “increase the combat stability of the fleet” and strengthen it.

Alongside strategic bombers and ground-based launchers, missile-carrying warships and submarines play an important role in Russia’s regular long-range missile attacks.

Neizhpapa said Ukraine had destroyed or damaged 27 naval vessels, including five that he said were destroyed by sea mines laid by Ukrainian naval drones near the Bay of Sevastopol.

Moscow seized and annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014. Before February 2022, Russia used its Black Sea Fleet, which consists of dozens of warships, to project power into the Mediterranean and the Middle East.

Throughout the Ukraine war, Turkey, which controls the straits in and out of the Black Sea, has not allowed warships to enter or exit.

DEFENSIVE POSTURE

In a sign of their more defensive posture, some Russian warships that seldom entered the Sea of Azov to the east of Crimea are now stationed there regularly, Neizhpapa said.

Monitoring data compiled by the Ukrainian Navy and provided to Reuters showed that as of June 27, 10 Russian warships were stationed in the Sea of Azov compared with none in 2023.

The Black Sea Fleet is primarily used now for logistics, a small amount of coastal territorial control and for firing Kalibr cruise missiles at Ukraine, he said.

He declined to say what Ukraine’s future plans in the Black Sea would involve.

Ukraine’s operations in the Black Sea have allowed it to establish and secure its own shipping corridor without Russia’s blessing after Moscow pulled out of the wartime food export deal brokered by the United Nations last year.

The pushback began with Ukrainian coastal defenses that allowed it to force naval vessels away. In April 2022, Ukrainian anti-ship missiles sank the Moskva, the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, in a humiliating blow for the Kremlin.

With the addition of naval drone attacks and strikes, Russian warships do not enter the northwestern part of the Black Sea over an area of almost 9,650 square miles, Neizhpapa said.

He said the delivery of U.S.-made F-16 fighter aircraft, expected to happen soon, would be a boost allowing it to challenge what he called Russia’s “full dominance” of the skies over the Black Sea.

“F-16s with the right armaments will be able to push away Russian warplanes. The northwestern part of the Black Sea, particularly the corridor for civilian ships, will be almost 100% secure,” he said.

He added that Ukraine would like to expand its shipping corridor, which currently only involves maritime traffic from three of the main Odesa ports, to include the ports of Mykolaiv and Kherson, but that it was not possible.

He cited Russia’s control over the Kinburn Spit, which juts out along that route.

Civilian vessels are accompanied by patrol boats in some areas to help with protection against mines, and air defenses provided cover both to the ports and the corridors, he said.

The volume of cargo through the corridor has stabilized over the last six months, with Ukraine operating two daily convoys of vessels in comparison with one in 2023.

General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan tells Al Jazeera many countries remain silent over alleged RSF crimes in Sudan’s civil war.

Sudan army chief General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan has said “many countries remain silent and turn a blind eye” to crimes allegedly committed by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in the country’s more-than-year-long civil war.

Sudan has been gripped by war since April 2023, when fighting erupted between forces loyal to al-Burhan and the RSF led by his former deputy, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo.

Since the war broke out, tens of thousands of people have been killed and millions more have been displaced as a humanitarian crisis has deepened.

Both sides have been accused of possibly committing war crimes by UN officials and rights groups.

In an exclusive interview with Al Jazeera in Port Sudan, al-Burhan said, “Many countries remain silent and turn a blind eye to the crimes being committed every day.”

“Every day, the enemies are killing the Sudanese people, plundering their land and raping their wives and daughters … Everyone who remains silent and those who support what the other side is doing daily is definitely an enemy,” al-Burhan said, without naming any country.

“Perhaps some countries have used their influence to stop aid provided to the Sudanese state. Some countries may have used their international and regional mechanisms to stop supporting the armed forces,” he added.

In March UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Turk, said his team had documented dozens of cases of sexual violence.

“Sexual violence as a weapon of war, including rape, has been a defining – and despicable – characteristic of this crisis since the beginning,” he said.

His team has documented 60 incidents of conflict-related sexual violence, involving at least 120 victims across the country, the vast majority women and girls, he said but added that “these figures are sadly a vast underrepresentation of the reality.”

“Men in RSF uniform and armed men affiliated with the RSF, were reported to be responsible for 81 percent of the documented incidents,” Turk said.

Paramilitary gains

The RSF has, in recent months, made several breakthroughs and is closing in on Port Sudan on the Red Sea, where the army, government and United Nations agencies are currently based.

When questioned about the RSF’s military gains, al-Burhan stated that “losses in battle or retreating in a certain situation does not mean losing the battle itself, and doesn’t mean defeat”, adding that “the Sudanese people and the Sudanese armed forces will never be defeated”.

In late June, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) said that the war has left some 755,000 Sudanese facing “catastrophe”, the most severe level of extreme hunger, while 8.5 million people grapple with food shortages that could result in acute malnutrition and death.

The United Nations hunger monitoring system recently warned of a realistic chance of famine in several areas of Sudan including parts of Darfur, Khartoum, Kordofan and Gezira states.

When asked about the humanitarian situation, al-Burhan told Al Jazeera, “When we’re talking about famine, we must talk about its causes and about those responsible for it.”

“Sudan has vast areas of arable land, and Sudan has huge numbers of farmers who know how to work these lands; most of the arable land has been cultivated except for the lands where the Janjaweed terrorist groups threatened citizens and prevented them from cultivating,” he said.

The RSF was born out of the Popular Defence Forces militias, commonly known as Janjaweed, mobilised by Sudan’s former President Omar al-Bashir against non-Arab tribes in Darfur.

“In Sudan, we have shortages in some areas that are under the control of these rebels, but in the rest of the country, there are no shortages, except for areas where people have been displaced,” he said.