Russia entered 2025 with two linked naval problems: a Black Sea Fleet that has seen substantial wartime attrition and a domestic shipbuilding sector that cannot, for political and technical reasons, replace those losses quickly. What began as targeted sanctions and commercial ruptures at Zvezda in the Russian Far East has, in effect, cut off one of Moscow’s only realistic routes for rapid large-vessel replacement, slowing and in some cases halting plans to rebuild capability in the Black Sea theatre.
Zvezda is not an ordinary yard. Built to assemble Arc7 ice class tankers and other large-capacity oil and gas vessels, Zvezda was designed to give Russia an indigenous capacity to construct complex, large-tonnage ships that had previously required Western industrial partners. That industrial promise, however, has been undercut by a sequence of external measures that make completion and operation of many of its projects infeasible. In January 2025 the United States explicitly included several tankers under construction at Zvezda in a sanctions package, a move that signaled Washington’s willingness to target vessels and shipbuilding lines before completion. The designation also marked Zvezda itself as a sanctions target.
The commercial fallout preceded the January sanctions. Western and allied suppliers had already constrained work at the yard after 2022, and high profile contract disputes eroded the pipeline of foreign technology and parts that Zvezda depended on. A long standing technical partnership with a South Korean yard, for example, ended in legal and commercial conflict when Russia sought to terminate block-supply contracts amid the post-2022 sanctions environment. Those contract ruptures removed key sources of modular hull sections and complex systems that Zvezda had planned to integrate into future builds. Taken together, sanctions and supplier exits have shifted Zvezda from being a strategic enabler to a high-risk, under-resourced bottleneck.
Compounding the problem, efforts to consolidate and shore up Zvezda inside Russia’s broader industrial base faltered. Plans announced in late 2024 and early 2025 to fold Zvezda into a larger, state-linked shipbuilding group stalled when prospective financiers concluded they lacked the resources or political cover to proceed. The collapse of those consolidation talks left Zvezda without the capital injection and management integration that might have mitigated supply chain shocks and sustained production under sanctions. That failure made it harder for Moscow to pivot to a purely domestic recovery of shipbuilding scale in the near term.
Why does this matter for the Black Sea? Ukraine and its partners have, since 2022, exacted disproportionate costs on Russian naval assets in the Black Sea with a mix of missiles, unmanned surface vessels and precision strikes. Independent open-source tallies documented dozens of Russian ships damaged or destroyed through mid 2024 alone. Those losses created an urgent demand signal for replacements and repairs. But rebuilding or replacing modern surface combatants and large amphibious vessels requires capacity, expertise and complex components Zvezda was supposed to provide at scale. With Zvezda constrained, that replacement pipeline narrowed sharply, meaning Russia cannot quickly restore the fleet to prewar levels without long delays or outside help that is constrained by sanctions.
Put bluntly, Moscow faces a material mismatch between operational needs in the Black Sea and domestic industrial capabilities. The immediate operational consequences are already visible. The Black Sea Fleet has shifted primary operations eastward to more secure bases, and Russia has increasingly relied on older hulls, secondhand conversions and a sanctioned commercial shadow fleet for logistics and power projection. None of these stopgap measures restores lost surface combat power or amphibious lift in the short term. Reconstituting a modern fleet will take years of heavy investment, new supply relationships, or a loosening of sanctions conditions that is not currently on offer.
This situation creates layered strategic effects. First, Ukraine gains persistent operational space along parts of the western Black Sea because Moscow cannot reconstitute a full deterrent presence quickly. Second, Russia’s shipbuilding sector will be forced to prioritize civilian economic projects tied to energy exports and domestic infrastructure rather than purely military surface combatants, given sanctions and the economics of available contracts. Third, Moscow may accelerate alternative approaches that are cheaper and faster to field, including swarms of unmanned systems and asymmetric logistics workarounds, but those will not substitute for lost capital ships in power projection or amphibious operations. These trends are not deterministic predictions but reasoned inferences from the available evidence.
What should observers and policymakers watch for next? Three indicators will be decisive. One, whether Russia can find non-Western partners capable of supplying the complex propulsion, control and navigation systems required for modern frigates and large amphibious ships. Two, whether Moscow is prepared to shift scarce resources to accelerate domestic industrial conversion and to accept multi year timelines for replacement. Three, whether Kyiv and its partners sustain pressure on maritime logistics and production chains so that the economic case for rebuilding a conventional Black Sea fleet remains unattractive to Moscow. If those conditions persist, the practical rebuild of the Black Sea Fleet will remain stalled for the foreseeable future.
Long term, Zvezda’s predicament shows how modern wars between unequal blocs are fought as much at the level of supply chains and contracts as on sea and land. A strategically located, high capacity yard does not guarantee power if access to suppliers, finance and legal predictability is severed. For Russia, restoring meaningful Black Sea naval power is now as much an industrial policy challenge as it is a military one. The yard that was meant to deliver big ships has instead become a test case in how sanctions and commercial ruptures reshape naval strategy for years to come.