Admiral Kuznetsov: The Troubled Life of Russia’s Lone Aircraft Carrier

The year following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has been absolutely devastating for Russia’s military reputation on the world stage. When the invasion began on February 24th, analysts the world over predicted that the war would be a short one, because inevitably the great and terrifying Russian war machine would have no issues subduing its much smaller, much poorer, and ultimately much weaker western neighbour.

But that crushing and quick victory never came. Russian forces were completely repelled from the suburbs of Kyiv never to return, and now, after nearly a year of fighting, Ukraine continues to stand strong, and the initial lightning-paced advance of the Russian military has been reduced to a slow, brutal, and messy war of attrition in Ukraine’s border provinces. In light of this unexpected turn, analysts naturally began to wonder what went wrong, and consequently began poring over all available data in search of answers. What was discovered, simply put, was that Russia was never the great and fearsome power it had made itself out to be, and that the world believed it was.

In a desperate bid to present itself as a major military power, Russia had produced a litany of seemingly top-of-the-line and most fearsome military equipment that, in reality, was available in such small numbers that it served little strategic value beyond propaganda use, or simply was not of the quality that it was made out to be.

The Admiral Kuznetsov, the Russian Navy’s sole aircraft carrier, typifies this perfectly. For decades now, aircraft carriers have been considered one of the entry tickets to the military big boys club. Having one proves that you have an incredible military-industrial capacity, that you can project your power anywhere in the world, and that you are to be taken very seriously indeed. But scratch beneath the surface ever so slightly and you discover a ship whose service has been defined by accidents, disasters, and mishaps, and that now, due to a lack of funding and a military hierarchy that is corrupt from top to bottom draining what little funds would otherwise be available, the Admiral Kuznetsov is now little but a 40-year-old inherited wreck that the Russian Navy struggles to even keep in basic serviceable condition, let alone operate and deploy as a fearsome weapons platform—typifying the whole present situation with the Russian military.

This is the beleaguered history of Russia’s sole aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov.

History of Disaster

The Admiral Kuznetsov was built at the Black Sea Shipyard in Mykolaiv, Ukrainian Soviet Republic, with construction beginning in 1982. It has carried multiple different names throughout its 37 years in service, originally being named the Riga, before having its name changed to the Leonid Brezhnev, then Tbilisi, before finally receiving the name that would stick on October 4, 1990, when it was named the Admiral Flota Sovetskogo Soyuza N.G. Kuznetsov, or Admiral Kuznetsov for short. Given the ever-deteriorating situation in the Soviet Union throughout the 1980s, its construction proved to be quite the drawn-out affair, reportedly only being around 70% complete by mid-1989, and eventually being finished on January 20, 1991, after which it was finally commissioned into the Soviet Navy.

The first of its many career dramas would come in 1991 when it found itself embroiled in the events of the Soviet Union’s collapse. Like most of the Black Sea Fleet, the Admiral Kuznetsov was posted to Sevastopol in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, and it happened to be in port when Ukraine declared independence on August 24, 1991. Leonid Kravchuk, President of newly independent Ukraine, wanted to ensure that this vital military asset—which, after all, was built, serviced, and operated in Ukraine—remained firmly in Ukrainian hands, and as such ordered it to stay put. What was left of the Soviet government naturally had other ideas and dispatched Deputy Commander of the Northern Fleet Yuri Ustimenko, who ordered the vessel to sail to Vidyayevo so that it could be taken into the custody of his fleet, a request to which the loyal Soviet captain at the helm was more than happy to acquiesce. Unbeknown to both the Ukrainian and Soviet authorities, however, the remainder of its service would be continually plagued by problems, and frankly, with hindsight they probably wouldn’t have wanted it anyway.

The first of those problems occurred during a 90-day Mediterranean deployment that took place from December 23 through March 22, 1996. This was intended to be a most grand affair, with the Admiral Kuznetsov, the now-independent Russia’s flagship, being the lead ship of the cruise which was intended to mark the 300th anniversary of the Russian Navy, during which it would perform 24-hour-a-day aerial operations with its onboard complement of 13 Su-33s and 2 Su-25s while at sea. The affair proved to be most ungrand, however, when its evaporators—the vital piece of equipment that supplied its sailors with fresh drinking water—completely failed, and what water could be ferried aboard from supporting ships had to be rationed out to levels barely enough to stave off complete dehydration.

Following this, the Admiral Kuznetsov managed to have a largely incident-free few years. It was a relatively new ship after all, and most of its systems performed perfectly adequately with the minimal amount of maintenance that was allocated to it by the new, and very frugal, independent Russian state. It was only later, when deferred maintenance began to really pile up, that regular and more serious issues would occur. The biggest disaster suffered during this period of relative placidity occurred on September 5, 2005, when its arrestor cables failed twice on the same day. One Su-33 managed to be saved by the skill of its pilot and remain on deck, but another went overboard and was lost to the sea, with its pilot fortunately managing to eject and get rescued.

As time went on, however, those years of deferred maintenance began to cause serious problems for the Admiral Kuznetsov, and incidents began occurring with greater frequency. The next incident of note occurred on February 16, 2009, when one of its refuelling systems, long overdue for a total refit, completely failed and dumped 300 tons of oil and fuel into the waters off the south coast of Ireland. It was also around this time that the Admiral Kuznetsov began to be permanently escorted by an ocean-going tug, as Russian military leadership completely lost all faith in the ability of the ship to complete a single voyage without breaking down.

This proved to be quite a prescient move on the part of the Russian leadership, as a few short years later, in February 2012, the Admiral Kuznetsov completely lost propulsion while passing through the Bay of Biscay off the coast of Spain. Every effort was made to get life back into the ship’s engines while at sea, but all efforts in that regard proved absolutely fruitless, and it was eventually towed back to its home port of Severomorsk by its accompanying tugboat Nikolay Chiker. What certainly didn’t help avoid this situation was the fact that the Admiral Kuznetsov’s engines were now being used to power shoreside facilities while it was in port, as its supporting infrastructure had deteriorated to such a state that by this point even keeping the lights on quite literally proved to be difficult—this, of course, unnecessarily ate away at its engines’ limited operating time, and directly played a part in causing incidents like this.

Another deployment followed from 2013 to 2014, at which point the ever-growing problems with the Admiral Kuznetsov appear to have become too great to ignore and solve with as little preventative maintenance as the navy’s modest budget allowed, as following its return back home to Severomorsk, it would not put to sea again for another two years.

The Admiral Kuznetsov returned to the seas in 2016 following what Russian authorities claimed was an extensive refit and modernisation program in order to assist the Russian Expeditionary Force in Syria, in what was the largest overseas deployment of the Russian military since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The tugboat that continued to accompany it, however, suggested that contrary to what they may claim in the media, the Admiral Kuznetsov was still suffering from major problems, and was not being trusted to actually complete a voyage under its own power. The first problem of this deployment came on November 3, 2016, when one of its MiG-29Ks crashed into the sea. The cause? A broken arrestor cable that took so long to repair that the MiG ran out of fuel and crashed. A similar incident then occurred exactly a month later on December 3, when its arrestor cables failed yet again, causing an Su-33 to run off the side of the carrier and crash into the sea.

This deployment came to an end in early 2017 and it was announced—yet again—that the Admiral Kuznetsov would be undergoing an extensive overhaul and modernisation program, and this time, they meant it, totally, completely, 1,000%, for realsies, cross my heart and hope to die. With this overhaul, the Russian government also abandoned its pledge to replace the Admiral Kuznetsov by 2030, and instead announced that it would go on serving through to 2055, and this absolutely wasn’t because they couldn’t afford to replace it. Absolutely not. The Admiral Kuznetsov was just that good that there was no need to replace it.

Naturally, further disasters soon followed, with the most notable being the sinking of the PD-50, a Soviet-era floating drydock which had been Russia’s main apparatus with which to service the Admiral Kuznetsov, on October 30, 2018. As this was the only drydock in Russia which could fully accommodate the vessel, to say this was a slight problem would be a gross understatement. To make matters worse, the Admiral Kuznetsov was docked inside of it when it sank, and one of the PD-50’s 70-ton cranes crashed through the flight deck, leaving a 19-square-metre hole behind, damage that was estimated to cost roughly $1,000,000 USD to repair. Not that this repair would come anytime soon, as it took until the end of the year just to remove the wreckage of the crane, never mind actually repair the damage.

Then there was a series of fires aboard the docked Admiral Kuznetsov. A significant fire broke out in December 2019, which tragically killed two workers, injured dozens more, and caused damage to the ship estimated at $8,000,000 USD. Then, as recently as December 2022, another fire broke out aboard, which this time was promptly suppressed, caused no fatalities, and appears to have caused minimal damage.

And so ends the timeline of disaster that has been the Admiral Kuznetsov’s life. A once-mighty flagship, inherited by a nation that couldn’t afford to operate it, that has gradually spent less and less time at sea and more and more time in drydock as time has gone on and issues caused by a lack of routine maintenance keep continuing to grow exponentially.

But what caused issues as profound as these? In this chapter we talked a lot about money, or more specifically the idea that the Russian Navy has essentially been lumbered with this ship that it can in no way afford, but out of a sense of nationalistic pride refuses to give up on, and certainly this is part of it, but in fact the real causes of the sorry state of the Admiral Kuznetsov go slightly beyond a simple lack of funds. So now, let us take the time to explore these causes in depth.

Why?

Ultimately, the source of the Admiral Kuznetsov’s woes is a lack of funding, as we previously mentioned. Defence spending as a proportion of GDP has collapsed to roughly twenty percent of its levels during the Soviet period, and of course, this is only a rough statistic, but it does at least serve as a general indication of the direction in which Russian military spending has trended since the fall of the Soviet Union, and as a result it can be seen clearly that the new, independent Russia simply does not have the funds to properly keep the Admiral Kuznetsov, let alone think about anything as grand as replacing it. But this is only the headline of the story, and in fact there is more to the situation than a simple lack of funds.

Problems of Russian military maintenance and modernisation are not new and in fact are a much longer-run problem than many may first imagine. During the Soviet period, for example, yes, the gross amount of funding for the navy was significantly higher, but this funding was too heavily focused on ship development and production, with little left over for routine upkeep. Current Russian naval officers were trained by these Soviet officers, and as such a culture that promotes and encourages rigorous maintenance of vessels at the expense of new vessels procured simply hasn’t been fostered, leading to many maintenance projects, chief among which being the Admiral Kuznetsov, to be neglected.

Then there is the absolutely rampant corruption within the Russian military-industrial complex, which ensures that any money which does reach any naval officers forward-thinking enough to actually encourage more rigorous maintenance simply don’t have the funds to do their job correctly. This corruption is endemic at every level of the Russian military. On the lower level, junior officers and NCOs have been routinely discovered selling their issued fuel and supplies to civilians and their issued armaments to gangsters and cross-border arms dealers, and to see the higher level of corruption we only have to look at Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu, who owns an $18,000,000 USD mansion and is allegedly worth over $100,000,000 USD.

Given his salary is fixed at roughly $80,000 USD a year, you don’t need an investigative exposé to be able to make a reasonable guess at where that money has come from. What’s more, what we have just discussed represents the top and bottom most of the hierarchy. Make no mistake, some loyal and patriotic elements of the Russian military certainly exist, but at every level, you will find cogs in the machine all helping themselves to their own little slice of the pie.

Ultimately we can’t accurately measure the full extent of corruption within the Russian military, and we won’t be able to until a regime change opens up the military archives to outside researchers, but using subjective circumstantial metrics such as these, we can clearly see that there is a big problem.

The amount of military money disappearing becomes more apparent still when we compare the Russian military to militaries that, on paper at least, spend a similar amount on defence. For this specific instance, let’s compare Russia to the United Kingdom, as barring a few million here and there, both nations spend essentially the same amount on their defence—and how do they stack up? Well, Russia has its one ancient aircraft carrier that it can barely manage to keep afloat, and the United Kingdom has two brand new and shiny hyper-advanced carriers, and while Russia flies legacy Soviet aircraft off of its carrier (when it works), the United Kingdom flies top-of-the-line fifth-generation fighters off of its carriers. Make no mistake, the United Kingdom’s military procurement is far from perfect and has plenty of scandals of its own, but in this regard, suddenly the difference endemic corruption makes is absolutely crystal clear—and bear in mind also, Russia should be getting even more bang for its buck due to its comparatively cheaper labour costs.

Sister Ship: Liaoning

While it is undoubtedly important for us to understand the specific reasons for the Russian military’s failures in regards to the Admiral Kuznetsov, analysts often overlook another broader point which goes a long way to really contextualise the true extent of the failures—that being the fact that the Admiral Kuznetsov has a sister ship which has actually gotten the funds and technical support required, and as a result has suffered from none of the issues so far discussed, proving the fact that its failures cannot be blamed on any factors intrinsic to the Admiral Kuznetsov, and instead are to be blamed entirely on how it has been handled by the Russian military—that sister ship being the Chinese aircraft carrier Liaoning.

Originally also named the Riga, before having its name changed to Varyag in 1990, the Liaoning was the second ship of the Kuznetsov class. Like the Admiral Kuznetsov itself, it was laid down at the Nikolayev South shipyard in Ukraine, where its assembly began in 1985, before ultimately being abandoned in a state of 68% completion in 1991 due to the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the newly independent Ukrainian state lacking the funds to complete it. At this point it was little but a well-armoured husk of a ship, lacking propulsion, weapons, and electronic systems.

But for the Chinese military, which had long had the ambition of a carrier fleet of its own, an unfinished Soviet carrier represented a fantastic opportunity to both gain some much-needed experience in the production of aircraft carriers and cost-effectively acquire their very first carrier by completing the Varyag. Therefore they purchased it in 1998 for $20 million USD, where, following a long and arduous voyage under tow, it eventually arrived at the Dalian Naval Shipyards in 2002.

The Chinese Navy then took their time in completing it, making sure to arduously study everything that they had been left by the Soviets before forming a plan on how best to proceed. It was eventually ‘completed’ in 2006, at which point it was placed through extensive sea testing so that every single fault both in its original design and with its initial Chinese finishing work could be identified and rectified. So meticulous was this testing that it actually took longer than the work to complete it, and then, finally, after six long years of sea trials, with all its creases thoroughly ironed out, the Varyag was formally commissioned with the People’s Liberation Army Navy in 2012, where it was given the name Type 001 Liaoning.

The end product is a ship that, while certainly no Nimitz class in terms of complexity and sophistication, is a perfectly functional and reliable aircraft carrier that has suffered from none of the issues of the Admiral Kuznetsov. It operates a mixed air wing of up to 50 fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters, mostly comprised of Shenyang J-15 carrier-based multirole fighter aircraft (a design which ironically is also an imported and improved Soviet design), but also including Changhe Z-8 naval utility helicopters, Kamov Ka-27 anti-submarine warfare helicopters, and Kamov Ka-31 airborne early warning helicopters.

Like the Russians, the Chinese chose to discard the Kuznetsov class’s deck guns and instead converted the Liaoning into a true aircraft carrier. Notably, however, it lacks any kind of catapult launching system as is now typical on Western aircraft carriers, and instead employs a bow ski jump angled at 12 degrees to launch aircraft. A ski jump is objectively worse than a catapult launching system, and as such precludes launching aircraft carrying heavy strike loads, but in the context of China’s design philosophy of wanting to master the basics of aircraft carrier production and walk before they could run, it is a choice that in context is completely understandable.

Like the Admiral Kuznetsov, the Liaoning has ultimately gone on to find itself largely relegated from front-line duties, but unlike the Kuznetsov, however, this decision was a choice rather than a compulsion. Whereas the Kuznetsov was soft-retired due to an increasingly worsening maintenance situation that the Russian Navy did not have the funds to solve, the Liaoning has been soft-retired to serve as a training ship for Chinese sailors, because as the Chinese aircraft carrier programme has continued to progress, significantly better and more advanced options have emerged. It is important to remember that this was always the plan as well; the Liaoning was only ever intended to serve as an interim measure and a jump-start to Chinese aircraft carrier production. It remains completely seaworthy and combat-ready, and as such is still deployed from time to time when required, such as a December 2021 deployment to the Yellow Sea and a May 2022 deployment to the South China Sea—and it does this without having its engines burn out due to supporting a crumbling shoreside infrastructure, without its dry dock sinking, and without repeatedly catching fire while in drydock.

Understanding the Liaoning therefore proves critical in understanding the Admiral Kuznetsov; without it serving as such a shining example of how to handle a post-Soviet aircraft carrier, it would be easy to circumstantially dismiss the Russian Navy’s failings as out of their control: ‘well, it is an old ship after all,’ ‘so-and-so is wrong with its design,’ ‘Soviet carriers are just junk,’ and the like. And certainly, one could make the case that it is unfair to compare the fates of the two sister ships, as China’s defence spending is around five times that of Russia, with the former spending $293 billion USD annually and the latter spending a much more modest $66 billion USD annually, but given what we have already discussed about the drain that corruption places on the Russian military budget, and the Liaoning being only one of several aircraft carriers that China keeps afloat with that budget, is it impossible to imagine an alternative future in which a less corrupt Russia manages to keep a single old Soviet aircraft carrier afloat? No, not at all.

The Future of Russia’s Lone Carrier

So ends the story of the beleaguered Admiral Kuznetsov, at least for now, as given the fact that the Russian government seems unwilling to abandon its Great Power charade, it certainly doesn’t appear to be headed to the scrapyard anytime soon, and it may be many decades still until the old girl is finally allowed to retire with some dignity, rather than being kept alive on barely funded life support—an aircraft carrier that is testimony not to the great power and strength of the nation whose flag she flies, but to the hubris of its leaders and their antiquated imperial ambitions.

But what if things were to be turned around? Who knows, maybe a great purge against corruption will finally see the Admiral Kuznetsov get the funding it actually needs to take to the seas again? Ultimately, no one knows.

Key Takeaways

• Russia’s invasion of Ukraine revealed its military’s weaknesses, contrary to initial expectations.
• The Admiral Kuznetsov, Russia’s sole aircraft carrier, has a history of accidents and poor maintenance.
• Corruption and lack of funding have significantly hindered the Russian military’s ability to maintain its equipment.
• The Chinese aircraft carrier Liaoning, a sister ship to the Admiral Kuznetsov, serves as a contrast in effective maintenance.
• Russia’s military spending has declined significantly since the Soviet era, impacting its operational capabilities.

Sources

• Original MegaProjects video: Admiral Kuznetsov: The Troubled Life of Russia’s Lone Aircraft Carrier
• Hero image source by Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office / openverse, by.

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