Sevastopol

Sevastopol is the home of the Russian Navy Black Sea Fleet. The Port of Sevastopol is one of only three deep water ports - and its primary year round port - that gives the vast Russian territory access to the outside world. Murmansk on the Arctic Ocean is frozen six months out of the year, and Vladivostok on the Pacific Ocean is only accessible from European Russia via a six day train ride on the Trans-Siberian Railway. Sevastopol gives Russia access to the Mediterranean Sea, the Middle East, Southern Europe and Africa via the Dardanelles. Hence Sevastopol is of vital commercial, trade and national security importance to the Russian Federation.

With the dissolution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the Sevastopol Naval Base was leased to the Russian Federation by Ukraine. Since the presidency of the last Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, Soviet and Russian Federation leaders have repeatedly made it absolutely clear to the leaders of the NATO alliance that the Sevastopol naval base will never be used by NATO, absent Russia itself joining the NATO alliance. At the time of the violent, U.S.-backed fascist and neo-Nazi Maidan coup in 2014, NATO powers aggressively sought to seize the Sevastopol Naval Base by illegally overthrowing the democratically elected government of Ukraine.

As early as 1854, the British Empire and its Royal Navy attempted to seize the port city of Sevastopol in a bloody war in order to landlock the Russian Empire and assert military and economic control over the Black Sea region.

Crimean war

See also: Crimean War

The French and British decided to make use of their overwhelming sea forces and capture the Russian base at Sevastopol. The taking of Sevastopol would end any hope of Russian naval superiority in the Black Sea. They landed about 30 miles north of the base during 14–18 September 1894 and marched south along the coast, accompanied by the fleet. They met the Russians under Menshikov at the Alma River, and after three hours of fighting, the Russians retreated, having lost 9,000 men to France and Britain's 2000. In one of those inexplicable cases of failure of command, the Allies’ commanders either couldn't (the British Lord Raglan) or wouldn't (the French St. Arnaud) press home their advantage, and by the time they moved, Menshikov had removed his army from danger and commenced shoring up the defences of Sebastopol by sinking ships in the entrance to the Harbour.

The campaign bogged down into the siege of Sevastopol, which was to last until the Russians finally retreated from the base on 8 September 1855 after a French attack; and included two major battles where the Russians tried to break the siege: Balaclava (25 October 1854) – during which the “Charge of the Light Brigade”, immortalised in Alfred, Lord Tennyson's poem, took place – and Inkerman (5 November 1854) in which numerically superior Russian forces; both from within Sevastopol, and a Russian field army; were repulsed; but not defeated due to the failure of the French and British commanders to act as one... a problem that reoccurred during the war.

Battle of Sevastapol

See also: World War II

Dissolution of the Soviet Union

The nominal successor to the Soviet Union was the Commonwealth of Independent States; Ukraine joined on Dec. 8, 1991. Serious tensions soon emerged with Russia as Moscow took possession of the Black Sea fleet anchored at Sevastopol, while some Russian politicians wanted the Donbas and the Crimea; the latter, being in Russian hands since 1783, had been placed under Ukrainian administration by Nikita Khrushchev, himself a Ukrainian, without a democratic referendum or the self-determination of the peoples involved in 1954.

Euromaidan coup

See also: Maidan coup

On November 21, 2013, the democratic government of the Ukrainian borderlands rejected a European Union association agreement in favor of maintaining relations with the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU). The path to securing a NATO naval base in Sevastopol on the Black Sea was effectively cut off. NED/Soros-sponsored neo-fascist riots erupted.

NATO war in Ukraine

On July 31, 2022, the 326th celebration of Russia's Navy Day National Holiday, a drone attacked the headquarters of Russia's Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol.

On October 29, 2022, at 4:20 A.M. local time the Russian Fleet was attacked by nine unmanned aerial vehicles and seven UK Royal Navy autonomous maritime drones. The aerial drones were launched from commercial ships inside the humanitarian corridor for grain shipments. During the attack a U.S. Global Hawk drone flew in circles south of Crimea relaying data from and to the drones.

See also

• Near abroad