Russia's crumbling shipbuilding sector, which has been under increasing crisis since 2014 when Moscow illegally annexed Crimea, is hampering the Kremlin's efforts to be a reliable partner to countries across the Middle East.

Due to sanctions, Russian ships do not possess key Western components, especially for on-board electronics and engines, and domestic enterprises are struggling to produce equivalents.

"All their assets are worn out," Andriy Ryzhenko, former deputy chief of staff of the Ukrainian navy, told Citadel. "Plus, not all the specialists are available ... corruption there is severe."

Russia increasingly has been trying to ally itself with countries in the region to break out of its isolation due to the Ukraine war, including trying to establish a permanent military presence in the Red Sea, a key route for cargo vessels traveling between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea.

However, recent years have exposed severe weaknesses in the Russian navy.

Ukraine has sunk or hit one third of Russian warships in the Black Sea since the start of the war, and ships that need repair or cannot be accommodated at Novorossiysk, Russia, remain in Crimea.

In the Middle East, Russia's largest ships are frigates. One reason is that the Russians are based in Tartous, Syria, where the port lacks facilities for in-dock repairs. Damaged ships must be transported to the Baltic.

"They themselves admit that their fleet in the Mediterranean Sea is likely just a shadow of past memories of what the Soviet Union once had," Ivan Kirichevsky, a Kyiv-based military analyst with Defense Express, told Citadel.

Russia's attempts to replenish its losses also have witnessed a number of setbacks.

In 2021, the Russian navy was replenished with seven large warships, four surface ships and three submarines, whereas in the following year, after the imposition of harsher sanctions, only five vessels were commissioned.

"Illusions that it is possible to replace foreign turbochargers, pistons and rings with our own must be discarded immediately -- in Russia there is simply no technical ability to provide the required level of machining of products," Russian defense journalist Alexander Timokhin wrote in June 2022.

Russia stopped building submarines in the Black Sea Shipyard in the late 1950s, and only relatively new submarines, such as the Project 636 class, can be repaired in the Black Sea.

Attempts were made to build small missile carriers from scratch at the Zaliv shipyard in temporarily occupied Kerch, but they ended badly. On November 4, a Ukrainian missile hit the Askold, a Russian corvette being refitted.