Russia's Two Kalibr Frigates in the Black Sea Have Each Been Hit Three Times in 2026

Ukrainian forces struck the Novorossiysk naval base on the night of 12 August 2026, damaging four warships. Two of them, the frigates Admiral Makarov and Admiral Essen, were hit for the third time this year — and neither has been reported withdrawn from service.

The two ships belong to Project 11356R, the class GlobalMilitary.net lists as the Admiral Grigorovich type, and they are the pair of Kalibr-capable frigates the Black Sea Fleet keeps at Novorossiysk, each able to launch the 3M14 Kalibr land-attack cruise missile. The third hull, Admiral Grigorovich itself, was deployed to the Mediterranean at the time of the April strike. All three remain listed as active in the Russian Navy inventory.

Their 2026 record reads as a sequence rather than an accident. Both were damaged in the drone attack of 2 March, both again on 6 April — when satellite imagery showed hits near the Kalibr vertical launch system on one ship and the bow section of the other — and both again on 12 August. The latest strike combined Neptune anti-ship missiles, Palianytsia jet-powered strike drones and naval drones. Analysis of satellite imagery published by the Exilenova+ and CyberBoroshno research groups reported an impact close to the eight-cell launcher on Admiral Makarov and structural damage around the launcher bay on Admiral Essen. Ukraine's General Staff said it was still assessing the damage; nothing was seen burning or sinking in imagery reviewed that day, and Russia issued no statement.

Two other vessels were hit in the same raid: the lead ship of Project 22160, Vasily Bykov, whose sister ship Sergey Kotov was sunk by naval drones in March 2024, and an unnamed Buyan-M small missile ship, another Kalibr carrier. The OSINT analysis identified a different set of auxiliaries in place of the Buyan-M, so that hit rests on the Ukrainian statement alone.

Set against the rest of the war, the pattern is the striking part. GlobalMilitary.net's naval event log holds 19 records for the Russian Navy for 2026 so far: 17 ships damaged and two lost. Not one is a commissioning. In the four preceding years of the war in Ukraine the log recorded four Russian commissionings in 2022, eight in 2023, four in 2024 and three in 2025, against a combined 18 sinkings or ships destroyed.

That figure carries a caveat worth stating plainly: the log tracks reported fleet movements, not the full order of battle. An absent commissioning means none has been reported in the sources the site follows, not that no yard delivered anything. What the record does show without qualification is the direction of the exchange — a fleet absorbing repeated hits on the same small number of high-value hulls, while Ukraine spends drones and missiles rather than ships.

Repeated damage to the same vessels also points at a repair problem. Novorossiysk became the Black Sea Fleet's principal base after Sevastopol was rendered unsafe, and a ship struck three times in five months is one that has been returned to a berth within reach of the same weapons each time. No damage assessment for the August strike has been published.