Russia’s sole aircraft carrier likely to be scrapped

Russia’s sole aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, is now likely to be scrapped after over seven years of delayed repair operations, Andrey Kostin, who chairs the board of the United Shipbuilding Corporation, Russia’s largest shipbuilding conglomerate, said on Friday.

Kostin, who is also the long-time chairman of Russia’s second-largest bank, VTB, made the comments in an interview with state-affiliated business daily Kommersant.

When asked whether the Kuznetsov had already begun to be dismantled, Kostin replied: “That’s our domain, yes. We believe that there is no point in repairing it. [The ship] is already over 40 years old, and is extremely costly… I think … it will either be sold or disposed of,” Kostin added.

The Admiral Kuznetsov is Russia’s only aircraft carrier and the former flagship of the Russian Navy. Its construction began at the Black Sea Shipyard in Nikolayev, now Mykolayiv, in Soviet Ukraine in 1982, before it officially entered service in 1991.

In 2018, the Russian Defence Ministry and the United Shipbuilding Corporation signed a contract for the aircraft carrier to be repaired and modernised by a shipyard in Murmansk, in the Russian Arctic.

This process was supposed to be completed by 2021, but significant delays to the repair processes, including its floating dock sinking and two major fires breaking out onboard, meant that the work was never completed.

Earlier in July, state-affiliated newspaper Izvestia reported that the Russian Defence Ministry was considering refusing to repair the Admiral Kuznetsov any further.