"Borets" (Борець)

The Life

"Borets" — the word means *fighter* in Ukrainian — is the operational callsign of an officer in Group 13, a unit of Ukraine's military intelligence directorate (HUR) that has taken public responsibility for the Sea Baby and other naval drone operations in the Black Sea during the Russian invasion. The individual's name is not publicly given, and the pseudonym is deliberately maintained for personal and operational security. The publicly available information is that Borets has served since the early part of the full-scale invasion in February 2022, and that Group 13 has conducted multiple successful naval drone strikes against Russian Black Sea Fleet vessels and infrastructure from late 2022 onward.

The Thought

The doctrinal contribution that Borets and Group 13 represent is the demonstration, under sustained combat conditions, that small, low-cost, semi-autonomous naval drones can inflict strategic damage on a conventional surface fleet. The Sea Baby class of unmanned surface vessel — essentially a jet-ski-sized hull carrying a warhead, driven remotely — has been used in attacks on the Kerch Bridge, on warships in harbour at Sevastopol and Novorossiysk, and on patrol vessels at sea. The cumulative effect, which Borets and the Group 13 public statements have documented, was to force the withdrawal of much of the Russian Black Sea Fleet from Crimea by late 2023 — a strategic outcome achieved by weapons each of which cost, as Borets has stated in public interviews, on the order of hundreds of thousands of dollars rather than the hundreds of millions such an outcome would once have required.

The strategic principle involved is asymmetric: an expensive warship can be damaged or sunk by a much cheaper attacker, because the attacker need not survive and need not deliver more than a single strike, while the defending ship must defeat every attacker and survive every engagement. The arithmetic favours the attacker at a cost ratio of perhaps a thousand to one.

The Legacy

The Ukrainian naval drone campaign has become, during its own course, the most closely studied example of unmanned maritime warfare in modern history. The doctrinal lessons — that small cheap drones can deny a sea area to a larger fleet, that a motivated non-naval actor can impose strategic costs without conventional naval parity, that existing naval platforms' defences against such weapons are inadequate — are being absorbed into the maritime planning of every major naval power. Borets's role in the public explanation of that campaign, conducted through carefully managed interviews with international media, is part of the campaign itself: the demonstration that such warfare can be conducted is also the deterrent against those who might face it.