The Russian Navy is sending 10 vessels, a mixture of landing craft and small gunboats, from its Caspian Sea Flotilla to the Black Sea. The deployment is ostensibly part of a larger series of readiness drills, but comes amid a continuing and worrisome Russian military buildup near the country's borders with Ukraine. The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, or OSCE, has also said there has been a spike in GPS jamming in the region, which has impacted its ability to monitor the situation as part of an existing agreement between Russia and Ukraine. All of this only further fuels concerns that a significant escalation in the conflict between these two countries may be imminent.
The Russian Ministry of Defense announced the planned movementof the boats from the Caspian on Apr. 8, 2021. The press release said that the Caspian Flotilla vessels would join their Russian Navy counterparts in the Black Sea for exercises focused on testing their "readiness to repel sea and airborne assault forces." Russia's Southern Military District, which includes the Black Sea Fleet, as well as the Caspian Flotilla, had announced on Apr. 2 that there would be major upcoming readiness drills involving approximately 15,000 personnel. On Apr. 6, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said there would be other such exercises, which the Russians refer to as "control checks," coming across the country, too.
Though Russian officials have said that this deployment, which is a complex undertaking that will have to involve moving the boats overland, is part of the recently announced "control checks," it's hard not to see it as part of a broader signal the Kremlin is sending to its counterparts in Kyiv. These 10 vessels are just part of a massive stream of military assets, including huge trainloads of tanks, other armored vehicles, artillery, air defense assets, and other military equipment, that have been flowing into southwestern Russia for nearly two weeks now, as you can read more about here.
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