Lawfare Daily: Ukraine’s Asymmetric Blueprint in the Black Sea
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 16 December 2025
⏱️ 39 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
At the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia held clear naval superiority in the Black Sea. Over the course of the war, Ukraine has developed an asymmetric maritime strategy using unmanned surface vehicles (USVs), achieving strategic effects against a superior naval force.
Ukraine has largely shifted from importing complete drone systems to assembling them domestically using foreign components, with China remaining a key supplier of many critical parts. What is more, Ukraine is now preparing to export its drones internationally.
In this episode, Katsiaryna Shmatsina, Eurasia Fellow at Lawfare, sits down with Cat Buchatskiy, the Director of Analytics at the Snake Island Institute, to discuss Ukraine’s maritime operations in the Black Sea, the use of drones, and the supply chains behind them. Cat leads a team of analysts producing frontline-validated research on modern warfare, defense innovation, and U.S.-Ukraine security cooperation.
Read more from the Snake Island Institute on Ukraine's Black Sea’s Asymmetric Blueprint and the transformation of a once-nascent drone industry into a critical pillar of national defense.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Any country that is thinking about future maritime operations should be looking at the Black Sea. |
| 0:07.2 | And that's not just because of implementing USVs, actually. |
| 0:10.4 | So implementing USVs is one of the lessons. |
| 0:13.3 | But countering USVs is actually a huge and potentially even bigger lesson. |
| 0:18.9 | It's the Lawfare podcast. |
| 0:20.8 | I'm Katerno Shmaitana and Raysia Fellow at Lawfare Institute with Kat Bucatski, |
| 0:25.1 | Director of Analytics at Snake Island Institute. |
| 0:28.5 | It's really less about acquiring a Ukrainian drone or, you know, buying from Ukrainian |
| 0:34.3 | manufacturers and more about understanding the processes behind how we were able to scale this type of fighting across our army, how we were able to scale our manufacturing base. |
| 0:47.3 | Today we're talking about Ukraine's maritime operations in the Black Sea, drones and the supply chains behind them. |
| 0:59.4 | To set the scene, could you briefly describe the state of Ukraine's Navy at the start of the full-scale invasion and how it has transformed since then? |
| 1:03.0 | Sure. So in the beginning of 2022, Ukraine had a navy, but we can't say that it was |
| 1:10.4 | completely functional as a traditional navy. |
| 1:13.3 | There's a lot of historical things that come into play here. |
| 1:16.8 | So, for one, during the times of the Soviet Union, all of the Soviet republics kind of shared |
| 1:22.0 | the Black Sea fleet. |
| 1:23.3 | And so in 1991, when Ukraine declared its independence and Ukraine, Russia, and the other countries |
| 1:30.8 | in the Soviet Union were kind of looking at what to do with that. |
| 1:35.7 | Ukraine and Russia essentially decided to split the Black Sea Fleet 50-50. |
| 1:40.3 | But we all know that there's no such thing as real 50-50 with Russia. And so what had ended up |
| 1:45.2 | happening was Russia took most of the powerful warships onto the Russian Black Sea fleet and left Ukraine |
| 1:52.5 | with very much a depleted capacity. So not nearly the same amount of ships, not nearly the same |
... |
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