December 9, 2024: The Russian navy has not been mentioned much during the last year. The reason is that there is not much of a navy left. Case in point is the nuclear-powered Nakhimov, a 28,000-ton battlecruiser that entered service in 1988. After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the naval budget was slashed to a subsistence level. The Nakhimov was scheduled to start a five year refit and upgrade in 1997. As of this year the rehab is still not finished and may not be for a few more years, or even never.

Since 2022 the war in Ukraine has been absorbing most of Russia’s military budget. Worse, the Ukrainians destroyed the Black Sea fleet with airborne and naval drones. The few surviving ships fled to the Sea of Azov, a branch of the Black Sea in the northeast, 1,300 kilometers from Crimea, where a few Russian ports and garrisons hold out against the encroaching Ukrainian forces. The Russians are under fire from cruise missiles and drones, and escape by sea is difficult because of the Ukrainian drones patrolling the air and able to direct naval drones against any Russian ships trying to reach or escape Crimean ports.

Another problem is the Kerch Straits, the three kilometer wide entrance to the Sea of Azov. There used to be a bridge across the Kerch Straits but the bridge is currently down, making it impossible to get from Crimea to Russia save by sea. That is difficult because Ukrainian drones spot the ships and call in missiles or naval drones. Russians keep trying to repair the Kerch bridge but Ukrainian missiles and drones keep disrupting that work.

While Russia has given up on the Black Sea, it still seeks to maintain control of the Northern Fleet bases in the northwestern Russian White Sea where the Sevmash shipyards are located. This is where the Nakhimov and two or three of its sister ships are based. The shipyards are currently preparing the Nakhimov for a return to service by 2026. That may be optimistic because repairs have missed their deadlines several times already.

Since the Cold War ended, Russian warship construction and refurbishment capabilities have declined considerably. An example of this in action are the extended and problem-plagued efforts to refurbish the lone carrier and four nuclear powered battle cruisers. For example, in 2022 a Russian shipyard announced it was ready to deliver the refurbished battlecruiser Nakhimov to the fleet. Work on the Admiral Nakhimov began in 2014 and was supposed to be completed by 2018. As usual, there were technical, economic and political problems that delayed delivery unto 2022. To get this done, the plans to refurbish the two oldest Kirovs (Admiral Ushakov and Admiral Lazarev) were canceled after it was discovered that these ships were in worse condition than expected and in 2021, they were officially retired and scrapped.

The Russian navy never recovered from the end of the Cold War and its sharp, continuing reductions in the navy budget. Efforts to replace the aging Cold War era ships failed. At the end of the Cold War in 1991 Russia had the second-largest fleet in the world. Now it is in third place, behind the United States and China. While China is now the most prolific builder of warships. Russian ship building capabilities continue to decline. This was particularly obvious in the case of major surface ships like carriers, battlecruisers and destroyers. There are only 29 large surface ships including a carrier, four cruisers, 13 destroyers and eleven frigates. The subs and large surface ships only account for 36 percent of the vessels in the fleet. The rest are smaller craft, including some amphibious warfare boats and ships. A third of the subs are diesel-electric boats. The carrier and four large cruisers are not much of a surface strike force. That task is assigned to the eleven guided missile armed nuclear subs. Only 16 of the 40 attack subs are nuclear, the rest are diesel electric. There are eleven special purpose subs carrying a wide variety of exotic weapons. The Chinese and Western fleets keep it simple, using nuclear and diesel-electric subs with very few special purpose subs.