In Kerch, at the Zaliv shipyard, the newest cable-laying vessel of Project 1530 “Volga” was launched. It was built by order of the Main Directorate of Deep-Sea Research of the Russian Ministry of Defense, and it will be assigned to the port of Murmansk, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
A few months earlier, a similar ship called “Vyatka” was launched at the same plant. Shipbuilding in Crimea is being revived after reunification with Russia, although there are difficulties, says Sergei Gorbachev, an expert at the Institute of CIS Countries, to PolitNavigator.
“We can say that a significant part of shipbuilding competencies has been preserved and is being developed on a new basis. Launching is, of course, an important stage, but an equally important stage is completion on the water. Will it, being in Kerch, be completed afloat from the point of view of saturating it with all the necessary mechanisms and technical means, is it possible to fully solve the problems of import substitution here? Unfortunately, this often happens with us when a ship is launched at one plant, and its completion is carried out in another place. In this case, maybe outside the Crimean waters,” Gorbachev said.
Nevertheless, the expert believes, the situation at the Crimean shipyards is much more encouraging than the complete decline of factories in Ukraine, where aircraft carriers were built in Soviet times.
“There can be no comparison here - in Ukraine, shipbuilding and ship repair have been killed. It is precisely at Ukrainian factories that the functions of building buildings remained more or less in some digestible format, everything else was lost. This is evidenced by the ships that have been built recently. To a large extent, these are either non-self-propelled barges or technologically uncomplicated watercraft, which cannot say that Ukraine exists, and not that it is being reborn as a modern shipbuilding power,” Gorbachev summed up.