The Russian Navy has settled on names for two Russian helicopter-carriers, which are due to be built in the coming years.

Russian TASS News Agency reported on the 11th of January that the Russian Navy will name the first two Russian-made helicopter-carriers ‘Sevastopol’ and ‘Vladivostok’, which were to be the names of the Mistral helicopter-carriers that were originally bought from France but later ended up with Egypt.

The state-owned media outlet cited a source in the defense industry as revealing the information.

The Russian Navy has not officially confirmed the names for the new vessels.

Production of new helicopter-carriers is included in the Russian state armament programme for 2027 according to local media.

“Last year, sources told Russian state-owned media that both would be laid down in 2020 at the Zaliv shipyard in Kerch, perhaps as early as May. The first vessel is scheduled for delivery to the Navy in 2025 while the second should arrive the following year.”

The vessels are to be 25,000 tons and have a length of about 220 meters, Izvestia reported. They should be able to carry over 20 helicopters.

Russia had initially been planning to fill its requirement for helicopter-carriers with the French-made Mistrals, two of which were ordered in 2011. However, in response to the crisis in Ukraine, France terminated the contract in 2015, after the vessels had been constructed, and returned Moscow’s payment. The French government later sold the vessels to Egypt, which has negotiated with Russia for equipment for the vessels.

In response to the loss of the Mistral contract, the Russian Ministry of Defense has put out requests for local shipyards to produce helicopter-carriers.

‘Lavina’ was the first designation for the class, revealed at the ‘ARMY-2015’ Russian military-technical forum, and at 22,000 tonnes is heavier variant designed by Krylov, opposed to the lighter 14,000 ‘Nevskoe’ design.

George Allison
George Allison
George has a degree in Cyber Security from Glasgow Caledonian University and has a keen interest in naval and cyber security matters and has appeared on national radio and television to discuss current events. George is on Twitter at @geoallison
Twitter

RELATED ARTICLESMORE FROM AUTHOR

28 COMMENTS

  3. There’s a lot of wasted deckspace with the deck basically following the hull form. Thus limiting the mount of aircraft it can carry.

  4. The Russians are gonna need to build another floating dock , along with the infrastructure as they do not have the capability to build such a large vessel , ever since they lost the Ukraine Nikolayev South Shipyard (Shipyard 444) with the collapse of the soviet union,
    hence them trying to buy french mistrals.

    • Russia does have yards that can build big vessels, the issue is the lack of yards with recent experience building large complex warships.

      This would be within the scope of what United Shipbuilding Corporation Baltic Yard in St Petersburg. This is a less complex vessel and Baltic yard built large sections for the Mistral class vessels that were eventually sold to Egypt. Baltic Yard was ear marked as the yard that would build follow on vessels of a similar type anyway. Part of the contract with STX France was to transfer knowledge to USC Baltic Yard in more modern commercial ship building practices. Baltic Yard is arguably the most able yard when it comes to Commercial ship building in Russia and have fairly recently built some very large Ice Breakers (Project 21900). (This Yard did also build complex warships up into the 80s – the Kirov class was built there)

      In respect of Large Complex warships Severnaya Verf also in St Petersburg is seeing investment and is earmarked to be the build location of the 20,000 ton Lider class heavy multi purpose destroyer. How well that goes is open to question considering that yard has struggled to build the new Admiral Gorshkov class frigates – albeit mainly due to lack of engines.

      • Read this off wiki,,,,,,, February 2015, Russian media said that the Krylov State Research Center in St. Petersburg was on its way towards developing another aircraft carrier. The design was under conceptual testing in Krylov’s laboratory.[10] There was no announcement of what shipyard would be able to build the carrier. The super-carrier project has been code-named Project 23000E or “Shtorm”.[11] The program appears temporarily suspended or slowed down.

      • Dmitriy Medvedev has stated that Ukraine Nikolayev dockyard had built all previous helicopter and aircraft carriers and that Russia does not have a dockyard capable of building aircraft or helicopter carriers at the moment,,,

        • There are Russian dockyards with the space dry dock wise, mainly in St Petersburg, the issue is experience and lack of key enabling technologies. The whole lack of large floating dry dock thing is a non issue that is being played up by those not in the know.

          • Yes mate and one of the Yards is Zaliv in Crimea with one of the biggest dry dock in Europe. It is 360m long, 60m wide and 13.2m deep. Also the yard in which the two LHD are supposed to be layed down on may 9th 2020, which will be the 75th anniversary of Victory Day.

            Here is recent Drone video of the Yard. One can also see 3 Project 22800 and 2 Project 22160being assembled atm. at the yard.
            https://youtu.be/fVVBCymv7ow?t=412

  8. Does Russia have some sort of contract with Airfix? The amount of models they release each year of future acquisitions is boggling!

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here