‘Maritime Power’ Gets Humiliating Slap In The Face In Novorossiysk

Today, not a single Russian shipyard is capable of building such ships.

Since the topic of the morning today is large landing ships, let's talk about them.

The fact is that there are always individuals who are dissatisfied with something. And even now, when the project 775 large landing ship tilted a little in Novorossiysk, they think something is wrong. Like, this was not the “Kalibr” carrier after all!

In this regard, I would like to note that, firstly, the very fact of this incident in the port of Novorossiysk indicates that this city no longer belongs to the deep rear. Secondly, this is a humiliating slap in the face to the security system of Russia, which, in the course, does not exist in this country at all...

And thirdly ... Yes, Project 775 is a landing ship that is not a carrier of the Kalibr SLCM. But it transports goods, equipment, and personnel. And most importantly, this is an old, Soviet-era ship built in 1976 in Gdansk! Today, not a single Russian shipyard is capable of building such ships! And not only...

As you know, on March 24, 2022, the Russian large landing ship Saratov was destroyed in the port of temporarily occupied Berdyansk, and two large landing ships of project 775 Caesar Kunikov and Novocherkassk were also damaged.

As of March 2023, both damaged large landing ships could not perform combat missions.

A year later, after the “incident”, Russia has not been able to complete the repair work on the large landing ships, the damage and incapacity of which it has not yet recognized, although it became officially known about the death of the captain of the Caesar Kunikov, Alexander Chirva.

Russia generally has huge problems with the construction of large landing ships. Of the projects that were developed, or rather copied from the Soviet backlog, there is only the project 11711, with a terrifying number of defects and shortcomings, which make her the most crippled large landing ship in the world.

At one time, I paid close attention to the development of the Russian project of large landing ships 11711, the lead of which was the Ivan Gren. This attention was due to the fact that, firstly, the Russian fleet experienced an acute shortage of large landing ships, and secondly, the fact that the 11711 project was a real technical and design disaster.

When Russia officially took part in the civil war in Syria in 2015, the Black Sea Fleet of the Russian Federation could not fully provide the Syrian Express with its large landing ships to ensure the grouping of Russian troops in the SAR with equipment, weapons and ammunition. For these purposes, even second-hand bulk carriers and vegetable carriers purchased from other countries were used. In turn, one of the hopes of the new generation of Russian large landing ships, the ship of project 11711 Ivan Gren was still not ready for sailing, being at that time in the state of construction for the 11th year in a row.

Laid down in 2004, repeatedly altered and corrected, the Ivan Gren large landing ship during her tests demonstrated terrifying stability and pleased with more than 40 design defects.

The ship was hastily finalized and commissioned by the Russian Navy the way it already was, and it was a real big landing disaster.

The second ship from this series, Pyotr Morgunov, it would seem, was supposed to embody the corrections of mistakes made during the construction of the lead ship, but it turned out that these corrections only added to the headache.

Finalizing the project, again, on the go, Pyotr Morgunov was laid down at the Yantar plant in June 2015, launched on May 25, 2018, and then endless transfers of the beginning and completion of factory sea trials began ... At first, their launch was planned for April 2019, then postponed to June 2019, later to August 2019, September 2019, and as a result, the ship reached the point of the contractor sea trials only in December 2019!

This clearly demonstrated how the second ship in the 11711 series turned out to be problematic, despite the baggage of experience and work on the bugs, which, in theory, should have been done taking into account the defectiveness of the lead Ivan Gren large landing ship.

In turn, in April 2019, at a time when Pyotr Morgunov had not even passed the contractor sea trials yet, two large landing ships of project 11711, Vladimir Andreev and Vasily Trushin, were laid down at Yantar.

After almost three years of silence about this project, it turned out that the construction of ships is being adjusted to take into account changes in the technical design and the timing of launching and handing over to the fleet will be different. How different — even those who build these ships, at the Yantar shipyard, cannot even approximately answer this question so far.

That is, project 11711 continues to change, and Russian shipbuilders produce each new large landing ship of this series that is not similar to the previous one, with the exception of one common feature — a large number of construction and design errors.

The ships “Vladimir Andreev” and “Vasily Trushin”, according to preliminary plans, were to be transferred to the fleet in 2023 and 2024, respectively. But taking into account the fact that both ships are on the stocks, it is very far from the completion of work on them, not to mention the contractor sea trials. And it’s not yet a fact that, taking into account all of the above, these trials will be successful for them.

Therefore, the problem with providing the Russian fleet with modern large landing ships has not yet been solved by the shipbuilders of the “great maritime power”. They are not capable of building high-quality large landing ships, but, as we can see, they can qualitatively waste ... ahem ... lose them in a war with a country that does not even have a fleet.

Oleksandr Kovalenko, t.me