Russia Might Talk Tough But its Navy is a Shrinking Wonder

[Onkel Neal]

The Russian Navy is in trouble. After years of coasting on the largesse of the Cold War, Russia’s navy is set to tumble in size and relevance over the next two decades. Older ships and equipment produced for the once-mighty Soviet Navy are wearing out and the country can’t afford to replace them.

As U.S.-Russian relations continue to decline, it’s a good time to look at an arm of the Russian military in control of a hundreds nuclear weapons, most of which can strike the United States within minutes. At the end of the Cold War, Russia, the largest of the ex-Soviet republics, inherited the lion’s share of the USSR’s military equipment. Among naval forces this included several Kiev and Riga-class aircraft carriers, Kirov-class nuclear powered battlecruisers, destroyers, frigates, and more than two hundred submarines—including the enormous Akula-class ballistic missile submarines. Russia, struggling to switch from a planned to market economy, could not afford to maintain such a truly massive force and scrapped much of it, preserving only the newest equipment.

Russia’s naval decline isn’t just a matter of fewer warships but a decline of industry and infrastructure. Russia can’t even build large engines for warships: as Reuters points out, several Russian warships under construction are currently sitting high and dry because they are waiting on gas turbine engines ordered from Ukraine, which was made a bit more complicated after Russia invaded the place. The war between the two countries means it could be years before those ships can hit the water. In late 2018 the Japanese-built floating dry dock PD-50 sank as the Admiral Kuznetsov departed it, leaving Russia without a place to work on large warships.

More details on the diminishing Russian naval force