Russia Just Re-floated the World’s Largest Combat Ship After a 26 Year Deep Refurbishment

On July 25 the Russian Navy re-floated the Project 11442M Kirov Class nuclear-powered cruiser Admiral Nakhimov after a deep refurbishment lasting over a quarter of a century, placing it on course to undergo sea trials and return to active service. The protracted nature of the refurbishment was largely a result of the economic crisis that followed the disintegration of the Soviet Union, which meant that work on the ship only began in 2013, while the majority of the time the ship spent out of water saw little to no work done. The post-Soviet decline of the Russian shipbuilding industry has also contributed to delays. Commenting on progress towards restoring the ship to service, CEO and chairman of the board at the United Shipbuilding Corporation Andrey Kostin observed: “In my view, we’re making good progress on the state defence order. Today, you authorised the raising of the flag on the [Knyaz Pozharsky] nuclear missile-carrying submarine. In March, the Perm submarine was rolled out. And of course, we’ve also had another big event as the renovation of the Admiral Nakhimov cruiser is now over and it is undergoing trials.”

Kirov Class cruisers are by far the largest surface combatants serving anywhere in the world, and at 28,000 tons they are comparable in size to Japan’s Izumo Class aircraft carriers andover three times the size of the Arleigh Burke Class destroyers that form the backbone of the U.S. Navy’s surface fleet. The Admiral Nakhimov will have more firepower than any other surface combat ship in the world, and integrates a total of 176 launch cells for high diameter missiles, including 96 cells for surface-to-air missiles from a navalised variant of the S-400 air defence system, and 80 launch cells for cruise missiles. On April 22, 2021, the CEO of the Severnoye Design Bureau Andrei Dyachkov projected regarding improvements to the Nakhimov: “The high modernisation potential integrated in these ships upon their designing helped carry out certain works and outfit the Admiral Nakhimov with the most advanced weapons, which makes it the world’s strongest surface combat ship.” The integration of the Zircon hypersonic cruise missile has been particularly widely highlighted by Russian sources, and gives Russian Navy warships a distinct advantage over their foreign rivals in their long range anti-ship capabilities.

The Kirov Class is a remnant of an era when the Soviet Union fielded one of the world’s two largest blue water navies, with five of the nuclear powered ships having been laid down for the Soviet Navy, closely followed by the country’s first nuclear powered aircraft carrier in 1989. While the carrier was never completed, the cruisers were unaffordable for post-Soviet Russia to sustain, leading to three of the vessels being scrapped. The Russian Defence Ministry initially planned to finance the deep refurbishment of the two remaining ships, the Admiral Nakhimov and the Pyotr Veliky, the latter which has remained in service while the former has been refurbished. In July 2023, however, it was confirmed that the Pyotr Veliky would not be modernised, and would instead be relegated to an early retirement from service. A combination of the class’ high operational costs, the high costs of refurbishment, and budgetary strains due to the outbreak of full scale hostilities in Ukraine, are all thought to have influenced this decision. The Admiral Nakhimov is thus expected to remain totally unique as the world’s only nuclear powered surface combat ship, and to stand in a league of its own for its size, firepower, endurance and its sustained cruising speeds.