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Royal Navy divers lead the way for UK in joint exercise aimed at helping Ukraine
26 June 2025
Royal Navy divers and mine clearance experts lead the UK’s involvement in a significant coalition exercise aimed at helping Ukraine make the Black Sea safe.
The United States Navy and Ukrainian led training – known as Exercise Sea Breeze – is hosted by the UK in Portland and brings around a dozen nations together to practise and develop techniques to deal with the latest underwater devices and threats which blight Black Sea waters.
The two-week exercise (30 June - 11 July) puts to work mine hunting vessels, explosive ordnance disposal teams, diving and salvage experts and uncrewed underwater and surface vessels with the aim of bolstering their ability to operate effectively together.
For the Royal Navy, the Portsmouth-based Diving & Threat Exploitation Group (DTXG) will be testing techniques used to safely dispose of unexploded ordnance plus exploit the results for intelligence purposes alongside allies and partners.
DTXG will play a unique supporting role in generating exercise scenarios involving conventional sea mines and improvised explosive threats to tax the skills of the respective participants in Sea Breeze.
All of this plays into the government’s aims of making Britain secure at home and strong abroad, as outlined in the recent Strategic Defence Review.
Commander Rory Armstrong, DTXG Commanding Officer, said: “At a sobering time in world events, the strategic drivers for effective multinational collaboration have never been stronger. Sea Breeze represents an excellent opportunity to collectively sharpen our skills, strengthen operational relationships and is a further waypoint in the Royal Navy’s partnership with Ukrainian forces, for which I’m proud that DTXG is playing an enduring role.”
He added: “The global threat from sea mines and maritime explosive ordnance is pervasive, persistent and constantly evolving. It represents just one strand of our adversaries’ malign use of the seabed both to constrain our ability to project forces abroad and to seek to hold the UK at risk in home waters. Exercising our skills at Sea Breeze is a powerful example of nations partnering to keep pace with this rapidly evolving threat landscape.”
Together allies will plan numerous scenarios, then play them out bringing together a wide range of technology and vessels to battle threats.
These include mine hunting operations, the safe disposal of explosive ordnance, precision diving and salvage techniques, and the effective deployment of uncrewed underwater and surface vehicles.
The exercise will culminate in a demonstration combining these individual capabilities, further strengthening the cohesion and warfighting effectiveness of allied and partner forces.
At the Sea Breeze Headquarters, a combined and multinational staff will conduct training with a focus on planning and targeting capabilities, command-and-control of allied and partner forces, electronic warfare exploitation and countermeasures, and the integration of uncrewed systems to increase and consolidate cross-domain awareness.
This year, Exercise Sea Breeze 2025 is occurring in two iterations, Sea Breeze 25-1 and 25-2.
The first iteration, Sea Breeze 25-1, was hosted by the Romanian Armed Forces at Smardan Range, Romania, earlier this month, before attention turned to 25-2 in Portland over the coming two weeks.
Since 1997, Exercise Sea Breeze has brought together Black Sea nations, NATO Allies and partners together to train and operate with NATO members in the pursuit of building increased capabilities. Exercise Sea Breeze 2025 is an annual multinational maritime exercise, involving sea, land, and air components co-hosted by the United States and Ukraine.