Navy plan sinks with Ukraine war
President Vladimir Putin’s ambitious plans to build a huge modern navy capable of projecting Russian power around the world have been torpedoed by the war in Ukraine.
Russia relies on Ukrainian factories to produce vital components for its new naval vessels, a relationship that dates back to Soviet times when a large part of the country’s military shipbuilding industry was concentrated in Ukraine.
However, after more than a year of conflict in which more than 6400 people have died and in which Ukraine sees Russia as the prime aggressor, defence industry ties between the two countries have been officially severed.
Dmitri Rogozin, the Russian deputy prime minister responsible for defence, acknowledged the Kremlin’s naval rearmament programme was on hold while the navy searched for substitutes for 186 types of components and equipment and ‘‘in particular gas turbine engines’’.
‘‘Due to the termination of supply [of the turbines], we cannot complete the construction of surface vessels for the navy,’’ he said.
He added the hunt for import substitutes would be completed by 2018, freezing the shipbuilding programme for at least three years if the momentum behind it could not be regained.
The naval expansion was envisaged as one of the centrepieces of Russia’s mammoth 20 trillion rouble defence revamp up to 2020, an investment that has been ringfenced despite Russia’s economic crisis.
The naval high command was understood to be expecting up to 100 new vessels in that period, beginning with new nuclear submarines whose construction is not thought to have been affected.
However, the building of smaller corvettes and frigates, which rely on Ukrainian components, has been held up, as has one new class of corvette that requires electronic components from Germany banned under European Union sanctions. Work on larger destroyers and cruisers was due to begin in the 2020s but has also been shelved.
Many experts were sceptical from the start about the schedule for overhauling a much diminished navy largely made up of outdated Soviet vessels.
Igor Sutyagin, senior fellow in Russian studies at the Royal United Services Institute think-tank, said the Ukraine crisis had encouraged Putin to shift military spending priorities towards ground forces.
Added to that, ‘‘ships are expensive toys and Moscow politicians have never really understood how to use them’’, he said.
The navy expansion plan was ‘‘not quite realistic’’ from the start, Sutyagin said, because there was no clear articulation of what a large, fully modernised Russian navy would do.
‘‘Now with the problems in the economy it’s even less realistic.’’