Good day. And as I have so often said when we confront inflection points in this war, one must be careful to separate the visible strike from the invisible consequence. The images from Sevastopol — flaming docks, gutted ships, the unmistakable silhouette of damaged infrastructure — are vivid, yes, but they are not the whole story. What matters is what follows. This week, we begin to see what a post-Sevastopol Black Sea actually looks like.

For many months, Sevastopol functioned not only as a naval base but as a symbol of Russian continuity on the Black Sea. It was portrayed as immutable, inevitable, and, above all, secure. The Black Sea Fleet, anchored there, was not merely a collection of hulls and weapons; it was an argument about Russia’s place in the region. That argument depended on the assumption that the fleet’s core infrastructure could not be seriously threatened.

Ukraine has now demonstrated that this assumption was incorrect. Repeated strikes on dockyard facilities, on command centers, and on high-value vessels have forced the Russian navy to reevaluate fundamental questions: where it bases, how it operates, what routes it uses, and how much risk it is willing to tolerate simply to be present in contested waters.

Let us be precise. Ukraine does not have a traditional navy in the classical sense. It does not field large surface combatants. It has no aircraft carriers, no grand armadas. Instead, it has pursued a different path: maritime drones, long-range missiles, clandestine insertion techniques, and a highly adaptive targeting doctrine. It has, in other words, redefined naval power as effect rather than tonnage.

This week, that redefinition becomes tangible. Russian ships are spending more time in harsher ports. Logistic convoys are rerouted. Patrol patterns have changed noticeably. The Black Sea Fleet still exists, of course, but its posture has altered. And as I have often argued, posture is as revealing as capability.

The psychological shift is just as important. Russian commentary, once suffused with talk of dominance and historic rights, now betrays unease. The aura of inevitability has given way to a vocabulary of “risks,” “necessity,” and “temporary relocations.” One does not speak this way about a fleet that feels secure. One speaks this way about a fleet that is adjusting to the loss of a strategic anchor.

Ukraine, by contrast, is behaving with a growing confidence in the maritime domain. It understands that it cannot physically dominate the Black Sea. But it does not need to. It needs only to deny Russia the freedom to dominate it. And that is precisely what is happening. Every time a Russian ship hugs the coast a little more nervously, every time a high-value asset is relocated further from the theater, Ukraine’s strategic position improves.

It is worth recalling that for much of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, control of the sea was equated with possession of large, expensive platforms. But Sevastopol has made plain that in an era of cheap precision and autonomous systems, a state can impose decisive constraints on a superior fleet without ever matching it ship-for-ship.

As we look across the Black Sea this week, we see a new reality taking shape. Russia still has ships. It still has missiles. It still has, on paper, a far larger navy. But it no longer has what it once took for granted: secure, uncontested basing within immediate reach of the Ukrainian coast. That loss of sanctuary has consequences that will unfold over months and years.

Analysts in the future will no doubt focus on specific strikes — this dock, that ship, one headquarters or another. But if they are wise, they will also say this: Sevastopol was not only a place that was hit; it was a concept that was dismantled. And in dismantling that concept, Ukraine has opened a new chapter in the maritime history of this conflict.

We are now, quite literally, in a new sea.