Nuclear icebreaker had to sail all to St. Petersburg for basic hull work as Russia’s lacks northern dock
The new 220-meter dock built in Turkey is still stranded at port in Istanbul after the United Kingdom in May sanctioned the tug boat meant to tow it to Murmansk.
The Arktika, the led icebreaker in the Project 22220 class, was supposed to be the first to be docked in Murmansk, but the long awaited new floating built in Turkey will not arrive this year. Instead, the Arktika had to sail the more than 2,300 nautical miles around Scandinavia to have its required hull inspection.
The nuclear-powered icebreaker arrived in St. Petersburg on June 11.
This Friday she was set into the old shore-based dock at the Kronstadt Marine Plant, part of the United Shipbuilding Corporation’s Baltic yard, the plant’s portal informs.
Except in Severodvinsk, which is busy building and repairing military submarines, there are no floating dock in the Arctic big enough to lift the four newest nuclear-powered icebreakers of the Project 22220.
The only giant floating dock near Murmansk sank in 2018 at shipyard No. 82 in the Kola Bay while it was serving the aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov.
In 2021, Rosatomflot, the operator of the nuclear icebreaker fleet, signed a $68 million contract with Turkish Kuzey Star Shipyard to built a new dock big enough to serve the new class of icebreakers. The dock, which has a lifting capacity of 30,000 tons, was completed last fall and towed out via the Bosphorus Strait to the Mediterranean.
When Russia’s newest icebreaker, the Yakutiya, arrived to Murmansk in April, Rosatomflot director Yakov Antonov informed that the new floating repair dock would arrive to the service base on the outskirts of Murmansk in the second half of 2025.
That was before the UK decided to sanction the tug.
“UK sanctions have helped halt Putin’s plans to station a floating repair dock in the Arctic to service the precious icebreakers fleet,” the Foreign Office in London said in a statement in May.
Like Arktika, all of the newest nuclear-powered icebreakers have to be docked at least once every fifth year for mandatory hull inspected. Older nuclear-powered icebreakers, like the 50 let Pobedy and the Yamal, are smaller and fit into existing docks in Murmansk.
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