Between Snake Island and Russian-occupied Crimea sit 12 vessels that are crucial to Russian operations — but the Ukrainians are determined to evict them
Maxim Tucker
November 15, 2024
The Times
Powerful twin engines propel the boat out into open sea, the acceleration causing the Ukrainian special forces soldiers on either side to grip its lifelines tightly. A second boat follows, packed with more soldiers and their gear, then a third and a fourth. The elite troops we are riding with are about to embark on an operation with a unique set of challenges for modern warfare: storming oil rigs occupied by enemy troops. “It’s like something out of Waterworld or Call of Duty,” says Sergeant “Bunny” with a grin. “Sometimes, we think our commanders get their ideas from computer games.”
The convoy travels at speed, carving wakes into water as smooth as glass. Good weather is a mixed blessing for this mission. The calm makes for a comfortable ride, but the clear skies will expose us to the Russian air force for the next three hours. We are travelling with the 2nd Special Operations Squadron, known as “Vladyslav Peleshenko”, and the Bratstvo Battalion, part of the Timur group under the command of HUR, Ukraine’s military intelligence.
On the horizon looms the destination, a flattened smear of land, smaller than one square kilometre, for which both sides have sacrificed so much: Snake Island. The island, little more than a rocky outcrop, bears the scars of a battle of an intensity and significance that far outweighs its size. Burnt-out Russian anti-aircraft systems are strewn amid craters and the remains of a helicopter carcass.
This summer, The Times became the first western media outlet to visit the island since it was liberated from Russian occupation. We agreed to delay publication of this story until the Ukrainians concluded their operation there in November with the onset of the cold weather. The island gained notoriety on the first day of the full-scale invasion in 2022 when the small garrison of 13 Ukrainian troops told a Russian warship with a crew of more than 500 men to “go f*** yourself” after it demanded their surrender.
Garrison buildings have been reduced to husks by cruise missile strikes; observation posts and reinforced concrete fortifications obliterated by artillery. The island jetty has collapsed into the waves under the force of an explosion that sank a Russian landing craft as it docked.
A tattered Ukrainian flag hangs alongside a sign proclaiming the island for Ukraine, brought here by the HUR soldiers that recaptured it from the Russians in July 2022.
There are 112 miles of water separating Snake Island and occupied Crimea. Between them, a series of 12 enormous oil rigs, strung out like stepping stones that can serve as refuelling and logistics hubs for larger attacks on the occupied coastline. Last year, Ukraine recaptured two of these rigs, which they used to launch daring jet-ski raids on Crimea, but ten remain in Russian hands.
As dusk approaches, the sergeant and his men set out to try and change that. A small flotilla of rigid inflatables mounted with heavy machineguns and Mk19 automatic grenade launchers departs in the direction of the rigs.
The boats have no armour, so speed, manoeuvrability, darkness and a low radar profile are their best defence against the Russians. On board, the troops wear night-vision goggles and carry Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, antitank weapons, assault rifles and explosive FPV “suicide” drones. Reconnaissance drones in the air above relay each mission in real time back to commanders on shore, allowing us to watch.
After a gruelling journey several hours long, a rig comes into sight via a drone’s thermal imaging camera. The heat signatures of half a dozen Russian soldiers can be seen moving among the metalwork of the oil platform, patrolling different levels of the structure. Others are probably out of sight.
The Ukrainians launch an FPV drone, flying it into the rig, which momentarily disappears in the white heat of the blast. From that moment, the clock is ticking. “They have machineguns, antitank weapons, rockets, full air control and a quick response team of helicopters,” says Bunny. “We need to be very, very fast. They also have these fast patrol boats, Raptors — they’re faster than ours and armoured, so if we’re not quick it will be very dangerous.”
The Ukrainian boats open up on the rig, pouring a hail of automatic weapons fire into it as they manoeuvre to avoid return fire. Watching his reconnaissance drone feed, the sergeant sees a Russian marine take out an antitank weapon and calls out correcting fire against his position: “Enemy on the left, northern corner, mid-level!” Bullets clang into the platform’s frame, suppressing a missile launch.
Ukrainian FPV pilots launch their drones and try to focus on their small control screen as their boats swerve and bounce amid the waves. Russian jets are inbound and two drones are lost as the boats take evasive action. “They’re shooting at us with 30mm cannon, flying low and strafing us. Our guys are shooting back with Stingers,” says Bunny. Three times, a Russian jet roars over the boat, its shells falling into the water nearby. Twice they evade by manoeuvre, once by deploying a flare that burns on the water, fooling the pilot into thinking he has hit the boat.
The jets drop cluster munitions too, splattering the water with small explosive bomblets, any of which could tear through the Ukrainian boats’ rubber and puncture the sponsons. Somehow, the Ukrainians make it out of the kill zone alive and return to base for a brief respite. After the mission, they discover they have downed a Su-30 fighter jet. Russian tributes posted online to the 28-year-old pilot corroborate the kill. “It’s very difficult shooting from the waves, you need to find a rhythm and wait for your red dot sight to move through the target,” says the sergeant,
whose brothers in arms were given covert training on the special forces base of a western country. “Then you’re manoeuvring, taking fire from jets, handling explosives, flying drones — and all of it in the dark. Our western colleagues can’t believe we do it without air support, they think it’s crazy.”
The operational tempo is intense. “Sometimes, we have three, four missions per week. Sometimes, it’s two missions per day. So, we go there, come back, sleep three or four hours sitting in the boats and go back again,” Bunny says.
Some nights, they go out purely for reconnaissance, assessing the enemy presence on the rigs by launching drones into the air above them. These missions can mean they spend up to 14 hours on the water. Other nights, they call in strikes from Ukraine’s long-range antiship missiles, Neptunes, the same weapon that sank the Moskva warship, and assess the damage. They also guide long-range kamikaze boat drone strikes in collaboration with the Ukrainian navy. Then they try to drive out the remaining Russians.
Their ambitious missions have only been made possible by Ukraine’s remarkable success at sea, driving President Putin’s Black Sea fleet back to the Russian coast after striking a third of its ships with sea drones and long-range missiles, as well as destroying its headquarters with a British-supplied Storm Shadow missile. That has opened up the western part of the Black Sea for Ukrainian trade.
However, the Russians are also trying to force Ukraine from the two rigs under their control using missiles and bombing runs. Even on land there is little relief, with Russian drones and cruise missiles hunting the elite troops on the island and their bases on the mainland.
By November, Bunny claims they have killed ten Russian operators and wounded six, for only two concussed Ukrainian troops, but they have not been able to take back the rigs. “The Russians don’t give up. Every time when we go in there, we take maybe one, three, five Russians, killed. It must be terrifying to stay on a metal platform in the middle of the sea. They don’t see us, they don’t know what we’re doing,” he says. “Suddenly, one night, you take a heavy strike, then you have a very hard firefight. You lose men. But they keep coming back.”
Maxim Tucker was Kyiv correspondent for The Times between 2014 and 2017 and is now an editor on the foreign desk. He has returned to report from the frontlines of the war in Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February. He advises on grantmaking in the former Soviet countries for the Open Society Foundations and prior to that was Amnesty International’s Campaigner on Ukraine and the South Caucasus. He has also written for The Telegraph, The Guardian, The Independent, Newsweek and Politico.