Admiral Kuznetsov, Russia's only aircraft carrier, set to be scrapped after years of setbacks
Admiral Kuznetsov
, marking a historic turning point for the
Russian Navy
. After years of costly, accident-ridden refits and modernization efforts, Russian officials are now openly discussing abandoning the decades-old warship, which has been plagued by mechanical failures, fires, and missed deadlines.
The
Admiral Kuznetsov
, launched in 1990 and commissioned in 1995, has served as the flagship of the Russian Navy for nearly three decades. However, its operational history has been marred by chronic breakdowns and high-profile accidents. The carrier's inefficient Mazut-fueled engines produced thick black smoke, making it easily visible at sea and requiring frequent maintenance. Its endurance was limited to just 45 days, and it often needed tugboat escorts during deployments due to the risk of mechanical failure.
Since July 2018, the
Kuznetsov
has been confined to dry dock for an ambitious overhaul that has been anything but smooth. The ship suffered a deadly fire in 2019, a crane collapse on its flight deck, and persistent delays due to technical problems and alleged embezzlement of funds.The original plan was to return the carrier to service by 2022, but the timeline slipped repeatedly, with the latest projections suggesting a possible return in 2025—a goal that now looks increasingly unlikely.
Suspension of repairs and scrapping talks
According to Russian state media and sources cited by
Izvestia
(national newspaper of Russia), work on the
Admiral Kuznetsov
has been suspended, and high-level discussions are underway between the Russian Navy's High Command and the
United Shipbuilding Corporation
(USC) about whether to officially retire and scrap the vessel. The ship has not seen active service since 2017, and even if repairs were completed, many experts believe it would be hopelessly outdated compared to modern naval threats.
Admiral Sergei Avakyants, former commander of the Pacific Fleet, publicly stated that retiring the
Kuznetsov
is 'absolutely the right move,' calling it 'a very expensive and ineffective naval weapon.' He argued that the future of
naval warfare
lies with robotic systems and unmanned aircraft, not traditional aircraft carriers.
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The scrapping of the
Admiral Kuznetsov
would leave Russia without an operational aircraft carrier for the first time since the
Soviet era
, effectively making it a 'no-carrier' navy. While some Russian analysts and officials argue for building a new, modern carrier—potentially equipped for drone operations—there is skepticism about whether Russia can afford such a project, especially given the ongoing war in Ukraine and competing military prioritie
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Hindustan Times
42 minutes ago
- Hindustan Times
Underground with America's nuclear-missile crews
THERE ARE no big red buttons in the underground bunkers, or 'capsules', that control America's nuclear missiles. Instead, launching an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) involves decrypting and verifying orders, receiving the appropriate codes and then many hands turning many keys and levers at the same time: two per officer or 'missileer', two missileers per capsule and at least two separate capsules must act in unison. The redundancies ensure that no rogue missileer or crew can fire a weapon—or block a launch. Your correspondent went through the procedures in a simulator at the F.E. Warren air-force base in Cheyenne, Wyoming, home to the 90th Missile Wing. Even in a make-believe setting the dread was real enough. After turning the levers, there is no going back. Little squares on a grid on the console, each representing an ICBM silo, change colour, from red (ready) to yellow (launch confirmed). And then you wait. If you still have missiles, you stand ready to fire more. If you are out of weapons, you relay messages to other launch facilities. Above all, you wait for the enemy's nukes, which are almost certainly coming your way. You might strap yourself into your chair, put on a hard hat and pray that you avoid a direct hit. You hope that the survival features—60 feet of earth above; blast doors; springs and shock absorbers all around; and supplies, backup power and air scrubbers within—will keep you alive. And if you eventually make it back to the surface, what would you find? The mind-bending logic of mutual assured destruction, which holds that being ready to unleash a nuclear apocalypse serves to prevent it, faded from public attention after the cold war. Yet the terrifying questions of nuclear war are returning in a new age of big-power rivalry. The last treaty limiting American and Russian nuclear weapons, New START, will expire in February, with no replacement in sight. Russia has repeatedly threatened to use nuclear weapons. China is fast building up its arsenal. It will have perhaps 1,000 warheads by the end of the decade, according to the Pentagon (fewer than the 5,000-odd that America and Russia each possesses). In turn America is modernising all parts of its 'triad' of land-, sea- and air-launched nuclear weapons, parts of which are half a century old. Minuteman III ICBMs will be replaced with Sentinel ones; B-2 bombers with the B-21s; and the Ohio-class ballistic-missile submarines (SSBNs) with the Columbia-class subs. The government is also debating whether it needs more nuclear warheads. The most contentious element is the Sentinel programme, whose cost has exceeded its budget, raising questions: why has the air force botched its estimates, does America really need ICBMs and would arms control be the better answer? America's ICBM infrastructure is vast, with 400 missiles deployed in 450 silos scattered across the great plains. A spider's web of cables connect them to 45 'missile-alert facilities' (MAFs), each consisting of a peanut-shaped capsule below and a support building 'topside' above. Maintenance teams tour the unmanned silos and, when necessary, pull ICBMs apart 'like Lego pieces', as one put it, to be worked on back at base. Armed teams in Humvees and helicopters keep the sites secure. In 2024 the estimated costs of Sentinel jumped to $141bn, more than 80% higher than the previous projection. For critics such as Daryl Kimball of the Arms Control Association, a campaign group, the overrun amounts to rank incompetence. Having originally ruled out extending the life of the Minuteman III as uneconomical, the air force is having to do just that because of the delays to Sentinel, which was supposed to begin entering service in 2030 but may not do so until 2038. General Andrew Gebara, the air force's point-man on nuclear policy, says development of the Sentinel missile itself is progressing well. The problem is that the infrastructure to support it dates to the 1960s and 1970s, and is in worse shape than expected. The original plan had envisioned reusing existing facilities after a light refurbishing, but such are the problems with weakening cement and water infiltration that it would be 'cheaper and faster to just dig a new silo'. Similarly, other officers note, replacing old copper cables with fibre-optic ones would allow more data to flow and reduce the number of MAFs (from 45 to 24). Replacing the current facilities sooner rather than later brings other advantages, the air force adds. New silos will more easily fit Sentinel, which is expected to be larger than the Minuteman III. And separate systems would make it easier to operate both old and new missiles as Sentinel is phased in. A new control centre and warhead-handling facility are under construction at Warren. To save money and minimise disruption the air force will try to dig new facilities within existing sites, or on land it already owns. Does America need ground-based ICBMs at all? Mr Kimball argues that they are destabilising. Instead America should rely on a 'dyad' of missiles launched from air and sea. The location of ICBM silos is no secret, he notes, and they would be a priority target, giving a president a few minutes to decide whether to use the missiles or risk losing them. 'That vastly increases the risk of miscalculation,' says Mr Kimball; better to rely on submarine-launched nukes, which are nigh impossible to find and provide an assured second-strike capability. Eric Edelman, a former Pentagon official, retorts that, on the contrary, ICBMs are stabilising. Without them an enemy might be tempted to try to decapitate America's deterrent by striking the handful of nuclear-bomber and submarine bases, and command-and-control nodes. Moreover, new hypersonic missiles are harder to spot. With ICBMs in silos, an enemy must fire hundreds of missiles at the American heartland, which would undoubtedly be detected and invite massive retaliation. 'Why would you want to simplify your adversary's targeting problem?' asks Mr Edelman. China, which has built hundreds of silos in recent years, seems to accept such logic. Some argue that America should complicate the targeting even further by making at least some ICBMs mobile, as China and Russia do. A congressionally appointed bipartisan commission in 2023 recommended examining the possibility. This would revive cold-war programmes such as the Midgetman, a small ICBM carried on a road-mobile launcher, and the Peacekeeper railway garrison, a large missile carried on special railway carriages. Both missiles forces were intended to be dispersed across America's transport network in times of crisis, but the idea was abandoned with the end of the cold war. General Gebara says it was studied anew and rejected because it would be both expensive and unpopular. Beyond the cost and mix of nuclear weapons, a broader question looms. With the expiry of New START, America and Russia will no longer be bound by the ceiling of 1,550 'strategic' (long-range) warheads each. Some experts say the two sides should continue to abide by the limit informally, pending new arms-control negotiations. President Donald Trump has spoken about his desire for 'denuclearisation', and for talks with China and Russia to halve defence spending. But neither power seems interested. James Acton of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a think-tank, reckons nuclear policy is anyhow likely to be decided by the bureaucracy. 'Among the majority of the Republican national-security establishment that thinks about these issues there's a pretty clear view that we need more nukes,' he notes. As wonks debate, ominous responsibility rests on the shoulders of young officers on alert in the capsules, usually lieutenants and captains in their 20s. They typically work 24-hour shifts every three days, locked away in pairs, taking turns to sleep and work. In quiet moments they stream television and send text messages via a computer topside (no personal electronic devices are allowed). Many use the long hours to study for postgraduate degrees. On the day your correspondent visited the Foxtrot-01 capsule near Kimball, the two women on duty spoke of the hours of camaraderie underground, watching episodes of 'Friends', and their pride in keeping America safe. On a wall someone had drawn a whale with a spout in the shape of a mushroom cloud—a reference to the 'Moby Dick' squadron of second-world-war bombers to which their unit, the 320th missile squadron, traces its origins. Next to it were words that summed up a mission they hope never to carry out: 'Death from Below'.
Scroll.in
21 hours ago
- Scroll.in
Bangladesh: 19 killed, 164 injured as Air Force jet crashes into college in Dhaka
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Indian Express
a day ago
- Indian Express
Missing loved ones leave those left behind with ‘ambiguous loss' — a form of frozen grief
Rachel Ganz's husband might be alive. But he might not be. More than three months after he was last seen near the Eleven Point River in Missouri amid severe flooding and evacuation orders, Jon Ganz is just … missing. That leaves Rachel, 45, in a limbo of sorrow and frustration, awakening 'every morning to a reality I don't want to exist in.' She dwells there in a liminal state, she wrote by email July 11, with a stream of questions running through her head: 'Is he trapped by debris in the river? Is he in a tangled mass of debris on the riverbank? Did he wander off into the forested area instead?' And one that remains stubbornly unanswered: 'Are they ever going to find him?' 'Obviously I want my husband returned alive,' she wrote to The Associated Press, 'though I am envious of those who have death certificates.' Like the families of the missing after the July 4 Texas floods experienced for much of this month, Ganz is suffering from what grief experts call ambiguous loss: the agony of living in the absence of a loved one whose fate is uncertain. Humans across borders, cultures and time unfortunately know it well. Ambiguous loss can be intimate, like Ganz' experience, or global, as in the cases of the missing from the Sept. 11 attacks, tsunamis in the Indian Ocean and Japan, the Turkey-Syria earthquake, the Israel-Hamas war and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The distinguishing feature, according to Pauline Boss, the researcher who coined the term in the 1970s, is the absence of ritual — a wake, a funeral, throwing dirt on a grave — to help the families left behind accept the loss. The only way forward, experts say, is learning to live with the uncertainty — a concept not well-tolerated in Western cultures. 'We're in a state of mind, a state of the nation, right now where you either win or you lose, it's either black or its white,' said Boss, a professor emeritus at the University of Minnesota who has researched ambiguous loss globally over a half century. 'You have to let go of the binary to get past it, and some never do. They are frozen. They are stuck.' Sarah Wayland, a social work professor from Central Queensland University in Sydney, says ambiguous loss is different from mourning because it's about 'repetitive trauma exposure,' from the 24-hour news cycle and social media. Then there is a devastating quiet that descends on the people left behind when interest has moved on to something else. 'They might be living in this space of dreading but also hoping at the same time,' Wayland said. 'And they are experiencing this loss both publicly and privately.' Heavy rains drove a wall of water through Texas Hill Country in the middle of the night July 4, killing at least 132 people and leaving nearly 200 missing as of last week, though that number has dwindled as this week begins. Over just two hours, the Guadalupe River at Comfort, Texas, rose from hip-height to three stories tall, sending water weighing as much as the Empire State building downstream roughly every minute it remained at its crest. Those without bodies to bury have been frozen in a specific state of numbness and horror — and uncertainty. 'It's beyond human imagination to believe that a loved one is dead,' Boss says. This feeling can come in any global circumstance. Lidiia Rudenko, 39, represents a group of families in Ukraine whose relatives are missing in action. Her husband, Sergey, 41, has been missing since June 24, 2024, when his marine brigade battled the Russian army near Krynky. He's one of tens of thousands of Ukrainians missing since the Russian invasion in 2022. And she is one of thousands in Ukraine left behind. 'Some people fall into grief and can no longer do anything, neither act nor think, while others start to act as quickly as possible and take the situation into their own hands, as I did,' Rudenko said. 'There are days when you can't get out of bed,' she said. 'Sometimes we call it 'getting sick.' And we allow ourselves to get sick a little, cry it out, live through it, and fight again.' For nearly a decade, Leah Goldin was part of a very small number of people in Israel with the dubious distinction of being the family of a hostage. Her son, Hadar Goldin, 23, a second lieutenant in the Israeli army, was killed, then his body taken on August 1, 2014. A blood-soaked shirt, prayer fringes and other evidence found in the tunnel where Goldin's body had been held led the Israeli army to determine he'd been killed, she said. His body has never been returned. Her family's journey didn't dovetail with the regular oscillations of grief. They held what Leah Goldin now calls a 'pseudo-funeral,' including Goldin's shirt and fringes, at the urging of Israel's military rabbis. But the lingering uncertainty was like a 'knife constantly making new cuts.' In the dizzying days after Hamas' attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, the Goldin family threw themselves into attempting to help hundreds of families of the 251 people Hamas had dragged into Gaza. But for a time, the Goldins found themselves shunned as advocacy for the Oct. 7 hostages surged. 'We were a symbol of failure,' Leah Goldin said. 'People said, 'We aren't like you. Our kids will come back soon.'' She understood their fear, but Goldin, who had spent a decade pushing for Hamas to release her son's body, was devastated by the implication. In time, the hostage families brought her more into the fold, learning from her experience. Hamas still holds 50 Israeli hostages, fewer than half of whom are believed to be alive. In Gaza, Israel's offensive has killed nearly 59,000 Palestinians, more than half of them women and children, according to Gaza's Health Ministry, which doesn't say how many militants have been killed but says over half of the dead have been women and children. Thousands of the dead are believed to be buried under rubble throughout the enclave. Ganz, whose husband went missing in Missouri in April, said the sheriff's department and others searched far and wide at first. She posted fliers around the town where his car was found, and on social media. Then someone accused her of 'grieving without proof,' a remark that still makes her fume. 'One of my biggest frustrations has been people stating, 'If you need anything, please let me know,'' Ganz said. That puts the burden on her, and follow-through has been hard to come by, she said. 'We already have enough ambiguity.' She's thinking about setting up a nonprofit organization in Jon's honor, dedicated to breaking the stigma against men getting therapy, to show 'that it's not weak.' That tracks with Goldin's thinking that taking action can help resolve loss — and with Rudenko's experience in Ukraine. Boss recommends separate community meetings for families of the confirmed dead and those of the missing. For the latter, a specific acknowledgement is helpful: 'You have to first say to the people, 'What you are experiencing is an ambiguous loss. It's one of the most difficult kinds of losses there is because there's no resolution. It's not your fault,'' Boss said. In Ukraine, Rudenko said it helps to recognize that families of the missing and everyone else live in 'two different worlds.' 'Sometimes we don't need words, because people who have not been affected by ambiguous loss will never find the right words,' she said. 'Sometimes we just need to be hugged and left in silence.'
