Ever since Tsar Peter went to England in 1698* Russia has wanted a blue-water navy. Maybe they don't need one. Maybe coastal/littoral is fine.
From The National Interest, November 9:
How one recent events could help force some serious changes.
The sinking of the Russian navy’s biggest dry dock could spell trouble, and change, for the world’s third-biggest navy.*I've mentioned his visit a few times, usually in reference to a well-known and almost certainly apocryphal anecdote. Here's one version:
PD-50, a huge floating dry dock at the 82nd Repair Shipyard in Roslyakovo, Russia, accidentally sank on Oct. 29, 2018 after an electrical malfunction resulting in pumps overfilling the dock’s ballast tanks.
Four shipyard workers were hurt.
Admiral Kuznetsov, Russia’s sole aircraft carrier, was aboard PD-50 at the time of the sinking. The carrier remained afloat but suffered damage from a collapsing crane.It could take years for the Kremlin to make up for PD-50’s loss. In the meantime, the Russian fleet will lack a floating repair facility for the 60,000-ton-displacement Kuznetsov and potentially other large warships of Cold War-vintage.
Dry docks lift ships out of the water, allowing workers to access their lower hulls for deep maintenance.
Even before PD-50’s sinking, the Russian fleet was slowly replacing big, old ships with much smaller new ones that can’t sail as far or carry as much weaponry, but which are cheaper and easier to operate and repair than the old vessels are.
The Kremlin bought four new, small warships in 2018. The Russian fleet numbers some 300 vessels, most of them displacing just a few thousand tons of water. For comparison, the U.S. Navy has roughly the same number of ships, but they are, on average, much larger.
Before, Moscow planned on extending the service lives of its carrier and other warships from the 1980s in order to complement the newer vessels. For long-range deployments across the Atlantic or to war zones such as Syria, Russia tends to send Kuznetsov and equally aged, Soviet-built destroyer and cruisers.
Newer corvettes, which are a fraction of the size of a Cold War cruiser, have tended to remain close to home. In recent years, corvettes from the Caspian Sea fleet have fired long-range Kalibr cruise missiles at targets in Syria — all without ever leaving Russian waters....MORE
It was a different Admiralty and a different country, a different time and a different place, the past is a foreign land etc, etc.
At any rate, an old tale about Peter the Great's trip to England in 1698 and repeated in Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics:
From his British trip the following story is well known, though it is almost certainly apocryphal. Staying at John Evelyn's country house outside London, Peter marched into the drawing room one day with a shotgun over his arm and announced, in thick English, "I haff shot a peasant." "No, no, my dear fellow." replied his host, laughing. "You mean a pheasant." "Nyet," said Peter, shaking his head. "It voss a peasant. He voss insolent, unt so I shot him."Great story but not borne out by the facts. Pete stayed at Evelyn's home in Deptford which was handy to the naval dockyard (an Admiralty Yard) where the Tsar went incognito to learn the tricks of the navy biz.
Not that it is impossible the writer and the Tsar visited the country place but describing it as Evelyn's is wrong and shows a certain fast-and-loose approach to the truth.
Evelyn didn't inherit the family estate from his brother until 1699 by which time Peter had returned to Russia and begun building his navy, but this story was told to me almost word-for-word the first time I was described as insolent.
So I looked it up.
And for some reason recalled it in a post about Crispin Odey.
