Ukraine says Russian destroyer caught fire in Barents Sea

A Russian destroyer caught fire while sailing in the Barents Sea and is “fighting for survival”, according to the Ukrainian armed forces.

According to Dmytro Pletenchuk, spokesman for the Defense Forces of South Ukraine, the destroyer Admiral Levchenko suffered an engine room fire in the Barents Sea last week. He attributed this to the lack of proper maintenance and spare parts, caused by Russia’s inability to access Ukraine’s shipbuilding industrial base.

“This is what happens when a “superpower” receives sanctions from Ukraine and cannot independently service the engines produced in Mykolaiv. Ten years were not enough to solve this problem. One of the facilities caught fire,” Pletenchuk said.

Admiral Levchenko is a Udaloy-class anti-submarine warfare destroyer delivered to the Soviet Navy in 1988. Although built in a Russian shipyard, its four gas turbine engines (two D090 turbines and two DT59 turbines) were built at the Ukrainian Zorya-Mashproekt factory. When Ukraine cut off its defense exports to Russia following the annexation of Crimea in 2014, the Russian Navy lost access to engine components needed to repair its Ukrainian-built power plants.

Russia has set up a production line of its own versions of these engines at the NPO Saturn factory, including a design intended to replace the D090. The move is part of a broader import substitution effort aimed at ending dependence on Western allied defense suppliers. In a sign of Russia’s confidence in its success, its forces attacked and seriously damaged the Zorya power plant in March 2022, in the first weeks of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine; the factory, located in Mykolaiv, remains in Ukrainian hands.

The fire on board the Admiral Levchenko could not immediately be confirmed and the Russian Defense Ministry did not comment on the Ukrainian claims.

Ukraine has damaged, sunk or destroyed around 15 Russian warships in the Black Sea, including the flagship Moskva. The effort was successful enough that the Russian Navy largely withdrew to the northeast corner and the Black Sea Fleet patrolled with submarines rather than surface ships for security reasons, according to the Ukrainian armed forces. Although Admiral Levchenko was more than a thousand kilometers from the front lines, Pletenchuk described the destroyer’s apparent plight as another success.

“Just so you understand, there are several hundred crews there. Not Moskva, of course, but not bad either,” he said.