Soviet Aircraft Carrier - Such fears were actually well-founded and justified, as just two years earlier, Admiral Kuznetsov suffered a fire at sea while deployed to the Mediterranean, resulting in the death of a sailor onboard. In addition, the flattop – which had notoriously and routinely belched black smoke into the air – spilled hundreds of tons of fuel into the sea while refueling.
Sea power that might have been: the battle cruiser Izmail. Whatever the ostensible plans for the remains of Minsk might be now, it is clearly all-but-abandoned. There is one video of the ship on YouTube, that an individual shot in 2019 using a camera on a quadcopter drone.
Soviet Aircraft Carrier
There are no signs of activity on or around the ship whatsoever. Binhai Aircraft Park remains open and pictures show the ex-Kiev to be, at least on the surface, well maintained. The same cannot be said of the former Minsk, which, along with the aircraft on display, looked to be in an increasingly dilapidated state even before Minsk World shut down for good in 2016. The park was closed after government officials decided to reclaim the land
Disclosure Statement
it sat on for other purposes. The Russian Baltic Fleet has announced that it carried out a series of simulated missile strikes of its nuclear-capable Iskander system. This is not the first time that the Russian exclave – roughly the size of Northern Ireland and wedged between Nato and EU members Poland and Lithuania – has made the headlines as part of Russia's sabre-rattling.
If there was any real competition to Minsk World, it could have come from Binhai Aircraft Park in Tianjin, China, some 100 miles southeast of Beijing, which is where Kiev went. Q-5s are also on display on that ship, as are mock-ups of Yak-38s.
In 2011, the company that owns that park announced plans to turn that former carrier into more of a floating luxury hotel with at least five presidential suites. Once a highly inter-mixed area with a population of Germans, Poles, Lithuanians and Jews, it was ethnically cleansed of most of its German population by Stalin.
This was followed by a systematic campaign of Russification which sought to erase all traces of German heritage. The Minsk was first laid down in a Soviet shipyard, situated in what is now Ukraine, in 1972. It was the second ship in the Kiev class and was commissioned into the Soviet Navy in 1978.
Post Cold War
Stalin's Aircraft Carriers By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D. June 2012 Before Minsk World opened, some experts and observers had suggested that the purchase of the carrier by a Chinese company was some kind of subterfuge to assist in the establishment of a carrier capability for the People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN).
Kiev had also been sold to another Chinese firm with the stated aim of turning it into a tourist attraction. Around the same time, a more shadowy firm based in Macau, with ties to the PLAN, had bought Kuznetsov's unfinished sister ship Varyag from Ukraine, saying it planned to convert into a floating hotel and casino.
The ship, which had been repainted sometime in the intervening years with the hull number "16," the same as that on Liaoning, was subsequently moved to where it sits now near Shanghai, arriving there between 2017 and 2018. There had been plans to
establish a new Minsk World, but that has not come to pass, although it is not entirely clear why. It is worth noting that there has been a massive aircraft carrier replica, reportedly meant to be a near-full-scale mock-up of the American supercarrier USS Nimitz, that people can tour at the Military Education Center near Dianshan Lake, close to Shanghai
, since 2002. Want more 19FortyFive military, defense, and national security, as well as politics and economics analysis from the best experts on Earth? Follow us on Google News, Flipboard, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin. Also, sign up for our newsletter.
You can also find our code of publishing ethics and standards. Don't hesitate to get in touch with us with any questions. The ex-Minsk's present home sits just off the Yangtze River to one side of the Sutong Yangtze River Bridge in Nantong, China.
Its immediate neighbors are farms and associated agricultural facilities. Looking at satellite imagery of the site, to the immediate north of the Lagoon, there is what looks to be a viewing platform with a walkway leading back to various structures and a tented pavilion.
All of this looks to be part of equally abandoned work on a planned theme park that was to feature the aircraft carrier at its center, but which never opened. In light of Russia's unprovoked aggression against Ukraine, this signal should not only be read as one of defensive intent on Moscow's part but also as a potential sign of things to come: the next missile launch from Kaliningrad may not be a simulation.
An attempt was made to get Baku, by then renamed Admiral Gorshkov, back into service. However, in 2004, that ship was sold to India and it subsequently an expensive and drawn-out conversion process that turned it into a more conventional short-take-off-but-arrested-recovery (STOBAR) carrier with a full flight deck and
ski jumping. With limited immediate options to rehabilitate those two ships – the shipyards where they were built and that had the facilities necessary to conduct major repairs on them were now in the independent country of Ukraine – and the equally poor state of Kiev, the decision was made to
sell them off as scrap. By 1995, Minsk and Novorossiysk had made their way to South Korea to be broken. The fate of Kiev was more complicated and we will come back to that later on.
For Russia, however, Kaliningrad's main significance is military as an "unsinkable aircraft carrier". As a military base, the region adds significantly to Russia's strategic depth and is a critical asset for Moscow in its anti-access area denial (A2AD) capabilities in the Baltic Sea, potentially undermining Nato's freedom of maneuver across the Baltic states and parts of Poland
. Kaliningrad is one of currently 46 oblasts (administrative regions) of Russia, but the only one that does not have a land border with another part of the country. The roots of the territory reach far back in history and are closely connected to the fate of East Prussia and its capital of Koenigsberg.
Founded by the Teutonic Knights in 1255, it is often associated with German militarism. But it's equally famous for the philosophers Immanuel Kant, who lived his entire life in Koenigsberg, and Hannah Arendt, who spent part of her childhood there.
The former Novorossiysk was ultimately scrapped in South Korea in 1997, but protests by South Korean environmentalists prompted the sale of the ex-Minsk first to a Chinese shipbreaking company, Guangdong Ship Dismantling, and then to Si Ke Investment Company, Limited.
Si Ke, established by Chinese entrepreneurs who had made their money primarily through video game arcades, bought the ship with the express purpose of building a theme park around it. They paid approximately $4.3 million at the time, close to $7.3 million in 2021 dollars, for what was left of the Minsk.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the new Russian Navy took possession of all four ships, but found them difficult and costly to operate and maintain. Minsk had already been effectively put into mothballs sometime between 1989 and 1990 due to "severe engineering problems," according to the 1993 edition of Combat Fleets of the World.
In 1993, Novorossiysk also suffered a major engine room fire. The list of aircraft carriers of the Soviet Union and Russia includes all aircraft carriers built by, proposed for, or in service with the naval forces of either the Soviet Union or Russia.
Although listed as aircraft carriers, none of these ships (with the possible exception of the never built Ulyanovsk) was or is a true aircraft carrier. Specifically, they were ASW helicopter equipped ships or aircraft-carrying cruisers, including the FADMSU Kuznetsov, the only carrier still in service with the Russian Navy.[citation needed]
The "city of Koenigsberg and the area adjacent to it" (approximately one-third of East Prussia at the time) fell to Stalin. The Russian leader renamed it in 1946 in honor of Mikhail Kalinin, who had been chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet – the head of state of the Soviet Union – at the time of his death in 1946.
"Previously, China didn't have aircraft carriers. People find them mysterious and are curious about them. Even though China's first aircraft carrier [the Liaoning] has now gone on sea trials, it will be quite hard for the public to ever visit it
," Liu Chang, a marketing manager at Binhai Aircraft Park told The Guardian newspaper at the time. "I guess people can come here to fulfill their curiosity." Stefan Wolff receives funding from the United States Institute of Peace.
He is a past recipient of grants from the Economic and Social Research Council of the UK, the British Academy, the NATO Science for Peace Programme, the EU Framework Programs 6 and 7 and Horizon 2020, as well as the EU's Jean Monnet Programme.
He is a Senior Research Fellow of the Foreign Policy Center in London and Co-Coordinator of the OSCE Network of Think Tanks and Academic Institutions. Minsk is rusting away, seemingly abandoned, in the middle of a man-made lagoon some 50 miles northwest of the Chinese city of Shanghai.
It's a visual that feels better suited to a movie or video game set in a cyberpunk dystopia or an Earth where nature has reclaimed areas in the aftermath of some kind of apocalypse. It looks to be a sad and lonely fate for the ship, which was already spared the scrapper's torch once by Chinese businessmen in the 1990s.
Moreover, if there was a further escalation of the war – potentially involving Russian moves against Estonia and Latvia with their relatively large ethnic Russian and Russian-speaking communities – Kaliningrad would be an important launchpad for Russian operations.
So Russian military exercises in Kaliningrad are a signal of Russian capabilities and a way of exerting more pressure on the west - just as the EU was agreeing to its sixth package of sanctions. Minsk was assigned to the Soviet Navy's Pacific Fleet and had a largely uneventful service life in the twilight of the Cold War, as did her sister ships Kiev and Novorossiysk.
A fourth Kiev class carrier, Baku, was commissioned in 1987. It featured a new phased array radar, improved electronic warfare capabilities, launchers for four more P-500s, and turreted 100mm guns in place of the twin 76mm weapons, among other additions,
which often led to it being described as the sole example of a distinct subclass. How the ship, which had previously been the centerpiece of another amusement park in Shenzhen, just to the northeast of Hong Kong, some 750 miles away from its current location, got to where it is now, is something of a saga.
In recent years, Kaliningrad has also seen its economic value grow as one of the nodes in the multimodal trade networks connecting Xi'an in central China through Central Asia and Russia to the European market along the New Eurasian Land Bridge corridor of the Belt and Road
Initiative. At the same time, this has made the region more vulnerable in the context of the war in Ukraine and western sanctions imposed on Russia. As it turned out, despite assessments from experts that it would be too onerous to return Varyag to any sort of operational state, the PLAN did formally commission that ship in 2012 as the Liaoning, and it remains in service to this day.
There's no indication one way or another that the acquisition of the Minsk, along with the actual opening of Minsk World, was in any way part of some larger plan on the part of the Chinese government to conceal its aircraft carrier ambitions.
"Their target group is different," an anonymous advisor to the Minsk World project had told The Washington Post in 1999 when asked if there was a concern about competition from a future hotel and casino created from the Varyag.
Inert weapons, or mock-ups thereof, including missiles, bombs, and torpedoes, as well as other Soviet militaria were also displayed. Exhibits covering the Chinese military were also added. As seen in the video below, song-and-dance numbers were also regularly held at indoor and outdoor stages installed on the ship.
All told, the future of what is left of the Minsk looks bleak. It remains to be seen how much longer the present owners will let the ship languish in its man-made lagoon before making some final decision about its fate.
The longer it sits there, exposed to the elements with no real care given to its condition, the more likely it is that its next destination will be a scrapyard. Befitting this description, the Kievs had launchers for eight P-500 Bazalt anti-ship cruise missiles, also known to NATO as the SS-N-12 Sandbox, and two turrets with twin 76mm guns, among other weapons.
This was all in addition to their air wings, which typically consisted of a dozen Yak-38 Forger jump jets and a slightly larger number of Kamov Ka-25/27/29 helicopters. Kuznetsov also had a similar anti-ship missile capability, with launch cells built right into its flight deck, as you can read more about here.
The region recovered from its Soviet legacy after the fall of communism, benefiting from the special economic status it was granted by the Russian government in 1996 and from improving links with the EU in the years afterwards.
The Iskander missile system was first introduced to the region in 2016 and then upgraded in 2018, as part of a Russian strategy to counter Nato's deployment of an anti-ballistic missile defense shield in Europe. There have also been regular military exercises involving Russia's Baltic fleet, which is headquartered in Kaliningrad, including Zapad-21 in the autumn of 2021 and a series of war games since the invasion of Ukraine.
soviet aircraft carrier ww2, soviet aircraft carrier ulyanovsk, list of russian aircraft carriers, russian aircraft carriers, russian aircraft carriers in service, soviet aircraft carrier wows, soviet union aircraft carrier, soviet aircraft carrier kiev