The Black Sea war is forcing South Korea to reconsider assumptions about naval power that have shaped maritime strategy for more than a century.

In April 2022, two Ukrainian-built Neptune missiles struck the cruiser Moskva, the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, marking the first major warship lost to enemy fire since the Falklands War.

The Moskva strike was particularly noteworthy as Ukraine, a country with no battle fleet of its own had disabled roughly a third of one of the world’s established navies and pushed the survivors out of Sevastopol and forced key fleet functions east to Novorossiysk.

Ukraine