“The Admiral Nakhimov has been undergoing repairs since 1997, and the work has already exceeded the cost of building the revolutionary Zumwalt in the United States.
The Russian Federation has always been characterized by constant shifts in the defense sector and an increase in spending that exceeds any common sense. An excellent example of this is the repair and modernization of the Admiral Nakhimov, a heavy nuclear missile cruiser of the Orlan 1144.2 project.
This ship was launched in 1986 and was put under repair and modernization in 1997, which is still ongoing. The completion dates have been systematically shifted, and if we take only the last period, they were called 2018, then 2021, 2022, 2023, and now we are talking about 2024 with a completely logical forecast.
But now the Russian state agency TASS, citing its own sources, has reported the cost of all the work on the Admiral Nakhimov to be more than 200 billion rubles. However, according to the source, “this is not the limit.”
Converting these 200 billion rubles into dollars is a rather difficult process, because these funds were stretched over a considerable period of time, but if we take the average exchange rate for all this time, we can get somewhere in the region of $5 billion.
To put it in perspective, $5 billion is more expensive than the scandalous American revolutionary stealth aircraft Zumwalt, because the first ship cost $4.4 billion. Or it is the approximate cost of 2.5-3 Arleigh Burke-class missile destroyers. And we are talking about comparing with new ships, not modernizing old ones.
The reason for such truly astronomical costs per ship in Russia is that the customer, the Russian Ministry of Defense, was constantly changing requirements and modernization plans and had to redo what had already been done. And then this is a really ingenious scheme of the racists to cut up money on work that is later canceled, and therefore the implementation of which is not checked.
As a reminder, according to the final plan, Admiral Nakhimov is to receive 80 universal launchers UKSK 3S14, which are designed to launch Kalibr cruise missiles, Onyx anti-ship missiles, and the allegedly hypersonic Zircon missile.
At the same time, while in Western countries similar launchers are used for anti-aircraft missiles, including SM3 missiles, the Russian ship has separate SAM systems. The Admiral Nakhimov should be replaced by the Fort-M, a naval version of the S-300, and the Pantsir naval version.
At the same time, this cost of the work, and most importantly, its dubious real result, fully explains why the Russian Federation decided to write off the other and only ship of this project in service, the Peter the Great. Because even the Kremlin realizes that they are simply powerless to bear such astronomical costs again.
