At the end of March of 2024, the Minister of Defense of the russian federation and war criminalSergei Shoigu announced the alleged creation of a Dnipro Flotilla, which had to include a brigade of river boats. After that, russian propagandists began to admit in their publications that the Kremlin still needed to get the vessels and other equipment somewhere.
Firstly, there were talks of a possible transfer of some ships from the Caspian Flotilla, and then there were talks of a possible transfer of rare A-222 Bereg coastal artillery gun from russian Black Sea Fleet.
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But it turned out that to create this Dnipro Flotilla, russians used boats stolen from Ukrainian citizens.
In particular, the spokesman of the Navy of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Captain 3rd rank Dmytro Pletenchuk explained that the creation of the Dnipro Flotilla was a way for russian occupiers to organize the forces and means in the naval infantry units they have in Southern Ukraine. So, it is not about creating new opportunities for russian occupation forces.
As for the vessels used by invaders, the Ukrainian Navy spokesman described the situation as follows: "In their so-called Dnipro Flotilla, there are serious units that are big enough for the river, and there are boats that they simply took away from the local residents because the Left bank is full of summer residences. In Kherson Oblast, every second person is a fisherman. Accordingly, many people had these boats. And they have been using them for two years. Many of them no longer exist. This entity is already working, but now it will be called Dnipro Flotilla.
It remains an open question: what type of russian river warships could be meant here by "enough serious units for the river".
The Soviet Shmel class small river patrol gunboats of project 1204 immediately come to mind. They are designed for combat operations on river communications. The Caspian Flotilla had four boats of this design, some of them were probably transferred to the temporarily occupied Crimea by russians.
These armored boats have displacement of 77 tons, a hull length of 27.4 meters, a crew of 14 people, and a set of weapons: one 76-mm artillery gun, two 25-mm 2M-3M anti-aircraft guns and a shipboard BM-14-17 MLRS. But the nuance is that the use of such russian river armored boats during the war against Ukraine has not yet been recorded in open sources.
Earlier Defense Express reported about Ukrainian Magura V5 drone equipped with R-73 anti-aircraft missiles.
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