Kremlin is carrying out "activities" foreshadowing the aggression toward Moldova and imitating the threat from the sea near Odesa, a port city roughly 35 km east of the border with Moldova.
In this context, Ukraine's minister of defense Oleksii Reznikov repeatedly assured that russians could not launch a sea landing campaign near Odesa as the southern city is tightly secured by "Neptun" and "Harpoon" anti-ship missiles.
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But we can as well look at this situation from another perspective: how generally capable is russia to carry out a landing operation? To start with the fact that the Armed Forces of Ukraine have already wiped out the manpower of the russian marines from the Caspian flotilla, Black Sea Fleet and Pacific Fleet in battles on the land. Consequently, the question is, who is russia going to involve in the landing?
Secondly, what to land the troops from? Even if there are still 12 landing ships of the russian navy in the Black Sea, not all of them can be engaged in a landing operation. Part of the vessels is in permanent repair, while the others were actively involved in logistics for the ground forces or demonstrative actions on the sea, which means they cannot be used for that sort of operation immediately.
There is also a rather small number of ships reportedly involved in russian contraband of stolen Ukrainian grain and other goods. It shows that russia lacks even this kind of seacraft reserve.
Finally, there is the following question: does the russian military have any real combat experience of amphibious warfare? Since 1945, russia had not a single major sea landing campaign, and the experience of the Second World War can hardly be deemed as successful. Frankly, it was the opposite, the russians failed the preparation stage for operations and suffered heavy losses against the Japanese who were practically a paralyzed enemy in August 1945.
For example, US Naval Institute wrote in its blog that by the beginning of 1945, the Soviet Army had carried out 114 beach landing operations. In theory, it should have taught their marines how to do reconnaissance; how to coordinate the arrival of vessels between multiple echelons and the landing troops on the shore and in the sea.
The Kremlin received 150 various ships from the USA via the "lend-lease" program to use for these amphibious operations. This includes 30 Landing Craft Infantry(Large) ships, or LCI(L). However, practice showed that the russians were able to apply neither the advantage is equipment nor the accumulated experience.
For instance, the landing of 4,000 troops in three waves at the Korean port of Chongjin located 128 nautical miles from russian Vladivostok took three days in total, from August 13 to August 16. The reconnaissance was bad, the Japanese military was fighting back until Japan announced capitulation, and the defending forces had to surrender. Despite all of the issues and loss of 400 marines, that is, every tenth soldier, the Soviets declared "the operation was a success".
Or here's another example. It took 5 days for the russians to land an 8,000-men group in Shumshu, the biggest among the Kuril islands, throughout August 19-23, 1945.
During the operation, no one took care of the landing equipment, heavy weapons, ammunition, or vanguard communication tools, and "packed" all of that into the landing craft in an efficient way. No one cared about the reconnaissance either.
For these reasons, a bare minimum of Japanese coast artillery took down two landing ships, and the poorly planned algorithm of landing resulted in 300 soldiers "gone missing". The total russian losses in this battle were almost 1,500 personnel dead or wounded, or every fifth soldier.
Maybe remembering this painful experience, the russian military command decided to apply marines from the Black Sea and the Pacific fleets and the Caspian Sea flotilla as land assault forces in 2022. Especially if we consider that at that time they did not manage to approach Odesa despite the city being covered just by coast artillery.
Then, after the coastal defense started receiving such reinforcements as the "Neptun" and later "Harpoon" anti-ship missiles in April-May 2022, the russians completely lost any opportunity to launch a landing operation near Odesa. And it became one of their pain points in the ongoing war.
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