Since the 2010s, Russia has been modernizing its nuclear submarine for Zircon missiles
The timing of this submarine’s return to service has been constantly shifting to the right, and is now projected at 2025.
Russian propaganda media claim that their Project 949AM nuclear submarine Irkutsk, part of the Pacific Fleet and currently undergoing repairs and modernization at the Zvezda plant in the coastal region, was launched in 2023, while work on the modernization of the submarine is ongoing.
The history of this submarine is quite illustrative: it passed sea trials and state tests in 1988, and a year later it was commissioned into the Northern Fleet. In 1992, it fired the first anti-ship missile of the P-700 Granit complex.
At the same time, in 2001 the submarine returned to the Zvezda plant, and in 2008 it was announced that repairs had begun (according to other sources, repairs allegedly began immediately in 2001), or rather, that “technical readiness was being restored.” Five years later, in 2013, plans to modernize this nuclear submarine were announced.
In particular, instead of the Granit complex, the submarine was to be armed with the supersonic anti-ship missile P-800 Onyx and the hypersonic 3M22 Zircon. At the same time, today the racists call the Irkutsk submarine a carrier of Zircon missiles. It is noted that the submarine will carry more than 30 of these missiles and will also receive more than 30 Fizik-2 torpedoes.
The plant officially announced the start of repairs of this submarine only in the summer of 2019, when it was reported that the ship was to be delivered in 2022. However, the date was later postponed to 2023, and in January of this year it became known that the submarine would return to service no earlier than 2025.
As for the Zircon missiles, there is also an interesting nuance here – last month, Russia said it had not adopted them, although in 2022 the so-called Defense Minister Shoigu announced the start of mass production. And in open sources, there is a mention of the alleged adoption of the Zircon in January 2023.
