The commander-in-chief of the Russian Navy would have been dismissed, according to Russian media reports that the Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, has refused to confirm or deny, alleging that “there are decrees classified as secret and I cannot comment on them.” An appointment like this is normally announced by a presidential decree
The Russian portal Fontanka published last Sunday that Admiral Nikolai Yevmenov has been replaced by Admiral Alexander Moiseyev, for the moment on an interim basis. Until now, Moiseyev, 61 years old like Yevmenov, a submariner like him, was in command of the Northern Fleet and is decorated as a Hero of Russia “for his successful missile launches from a strategic submarine.”
According to Fontanka, Nikolai Yevmenov was appointed commander-in-chief of the Navy in 2019. He was born in 1962 in Moscow, studied in Leningrad and St. Petersburg, commanded the submarine forces of the Pacific Fleet and, since 2016, the Navy from North. He took over as commander-in-chief when the Navy, through the reform of Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov, was deprived of its fleets, leaving essentially only a body with representative functions, whose tasks included shipbuilding. Since December 2023, all fleets, including the Black Sea fleet, have returned to the control of the High Command.
In two years of large-scale conflict, Ukraine has had a series of successes against the Russian fleet in the Black Sea, allowing the reopening of a shipping corridor to export Ukrainian grain while ignoring Russian bombing threats.
The Ukrainian military claimed in early February that around a third of Russian warships had been “out of harm’s way” in this area.
In early March, the Ukrainian navy, for example, claimed that a special unit had destroyed “the most modern Russian patrol ship, the Sergei Kotov”, “hit by Magura V5 maritime drones” near the Kerch Strait, which links Crimea with Russia. The operation was claimed by Ukrainian military intelligence (GUR) with the cooperation of the navy. The GUR had published a video illustrating the alleged attack.
Among other successes, Ukraine bombed the headquarters of the Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol (Crimea) in September 2023. In the spring of 2022, at the beginning of the conflict, it managed to sink the cruiser Moskvá, the flagship of the fleet.
