Putin's ONLY rustbucket aircraft carrier that limped through Channel in pathetic show of force ‘to finally be scrapped'
Work on the hulking Admiral Kuznetsov has been suspended with reports suggesting the vessel is doomed for the scrapheap.
7
7
7
7
Putin's 'Ship of Shame' has played no role in the war against Ukraine and has instead been languishing in the grim Arctic port of Murmansk, in northwestern Russia.
It's believed the rust bucket - Putin's only aircraft carrier - will never set sail again, as 1,500 crew members were quietly sent to fight in the war instead.
Former Pacific Fleet commander Admiral Sergey Avakyants applauded the decision to cease repairs, calling the vessel an "expensive" and "inefficient" naval weapon.
He said today: 'The aircraft carrier is already a fading era.
'It is a very expensive and inefficient naval weapon.
'The future belongs to carriers of robotic complexes and unmanned aviation.
'If the decision is made not to continue repairs the Admiral Kuznetsov should just be taken, cut up for scrap, and disposed of."
The ship was inherited by the Kremlin from the USSR and has a history of malfunctions, said Russian media.
According to the report, it underwent repairs in 2018 after a trip to Syria and its future has remained "unclear" ever since.
Reports said: 'Misfortunes continue to haunt the heavy aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov, the only aircraft carrier in the Russian fleet that the Kremlin inherited from the USSR.
Second huge cargo ship is attacked and SUNK by Houthi rebels in deadly Red Sea raid
'Having been put under repair in 2018 after a voyage to the shores of Syria, Admiral Kuznetsov was never able to return to service on time, and its future remains unclear.'
The decrepit battleship, that has been described as the pride and joy of the Russian Northern fleet, set sail on its maiden voyage 40 years ago and has been involved in naval convoys passing the British coast.
It used to carry up to 28 planes (Su-33 and MiG-29) and 17 helicopters (Ka-52K and Ka-27), and was armed with P-700 Granit missiles.
But in 2019 and 2022, the vessel was struck by two separate fires whilst undergoing works - causing millions of pounds worth of damage.
When the Admiral Kuznetsov came to the English Channel
The Admiral Kuznetsov "sulked" past the UK on its way back to Russia from Syria in 2017.
UK Defence Secretary Michael Fallon dubbed the carrier a "ship of shame" as the vessel and its task group was escorted by a Royal Navy frigate and jets.
Britain sent HMS St Albans and Typhoon fighters to monitor the ship and "provide reassurance" to countries bordering the North Sea and English Channel.
Fallon said: "We are man-marking these vessels every step of the way around the UK as part of our steadfast commitment to keep Britain safe."
Cmdr Chris Ansell, in command of HMS St Albans, said: 'This tasking demonstrates the Royal Navy's commitment to protecting our home waters and readiness to undertake short notice operations.
'The movements of the Russian ships are being continually monitored in a co-ordinated response between the Royal Navy, RAF and our NATO partners.
"As an island nation, the security of the seas around our coastline is vital and this sort of task is routine business for HMS St Albans and the Royal Navy, which stands ready at all times.
The ship measures the length of three football pitches and weighs a staggering the 58,000-tonnes.
Last year, crew members Ivan Akenchenkov, 51, and Sergey Ovsienko, 30, and Oleg Sosedov, 21, who served on the aircraft carrier, were reported missing during a Russian attack in Kharkiv.
Oleg is now reported to have died during an attack in Kharkiv on July 23.
His mother Natasha Simbirtseva has been told by fellow servicemen that he had been killed.
She said: 'He has not been in touch since July 21.
'He was seen alive on July 23, and has not been seen since.
'But there is a fellow soldier who confirmed that the two [dead] are my son Oleg Sosedov and Dmitry Teplukhin [another seaman].'
The desperate mother said: 'No official information has come.
'The commanders are not calling and are not reporting any information.'
She slammed the 'complete inaction' of top brass in failing to search for missing men on they battlefield and repatriate the corpses of fallen fighters.
'It's ****ed up that fighters are being sent from our only aircraft carrier to storm a village in the Kharkiv region,' she raged.
7
7
7
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Sky News
6 hours ago
- Sky News
Plane with 48 people on board crashes in Russia's far east
A Russian plane carrying 48 people - including children - has crashed with no survivors, according to reports. The aircraft was flying from the city of Blagoveshchensk on the Russian- Chinese border to the remote town of Tynda, regional governor Vasily Orlov said. "All necessary forces and means have been deployed to search for the plane," Mr Orlov said on Telegram, adding all passengers and crew were killed in the crash. An error during landing in poor visibility caused the crash in the eastern part of the Amur region, TASS news agency reported. Unverified video, shot from a helicopter and posted on social media, appeared to show the plane had come down in a densely forested area. It caught fire during its descent, and no survivors were spotted during an aerial inspection of the site, TASS said, quoting a statement from the regional civil defence and fire safety centre. "According to the director of Tynda Airport, the plane caught fire upon impact, and a Mi-8 helicopter crew flying over the area reported no signs of survivors," the statement said. The Interfax news agency, citing unnamed sources in the emergency services, said there were difficult weather conditions in the area. The transport prosecutor's office in Russia's far east reported the site of the crash was 10 miles (15km) south of Tynda, adding in an online statement that the plane was trying to make a second approach during landing when contact with it was lost. Burning fuselage of the plane, which was from the Soviet era and was nearly 50 years old, was found by a rescue helicopter south of Tynda, emergency officials said, adding that rescue crews were rushing to the scene. The Antonov An-24 turboprop plane, built in 1976 according to its tail number, and operated by a privately-owned Siberia-based airline called Angara, disappeared from radar over the area, local officials said. It was believed to be a few kilometres away from its destination when it lost contact, the SHOT news agency reported. The local emergencies ministry put the number of people on board somewhat lower, at around 40, while Russia's Emergency Situations Ministry said 48 people were on board the flight. It was unclear why numbers differed. Yuliya Petina, an emergency services official, wrote on Telegram: "During the search operation, a Mi-8 helicopter belonging to Rossaviatsiya discovered the fuselage of the aircraft, which was on fire. "Rescuers continue to make their way to the scene of the accident". An investigation has been launched, authorities said.
Reuters
7 hours ago
- Reuters
Russian surgeons keep steady hands during massive Kamchatka quake
MOSCOW, July 30 (Reuters) - A team of medics was in the middle of surgery in the Far Eastern Russian city of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky when Wednesday's very powerful magnitude 8.8 earthquake shook their equipment and the floor beneath them. The medics used their hands to try to steady both the patient and their equipment, CCTV footage released by the Kamchatka region's Health Ministry showed. "Despite the danger, the doctors remained calm and stayed with the patient until the very end," Oleg Melnikov, the minister, wrote on Telegram. He gave no details of the surgery but added that the patient was currently out of danger. Russian scientists said the quake off the coast of Kamchatka, which triggered tsunami warnings as far away as Hawaii, Japan and Chile, was the most powerful to hit the region since 1952. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said there had been no casualties in Russia from the quake, crediting solid building construction and the smooth working of alert systems. Still, there were scenes of chaos along Russia's remote and sparsely populated Far Eastern seaboard, and scattered reports of damage. Roman Kripakov, a chef in Severo-Kurilsk on Paramushir, one of the Pacific Kuril Islands chain, said he was at the cafe where he works when it began to shake. 'We ran out onto the street, and saw that all the buildings were trembling. Pipes, bricks, they were all falling down from the roofs,' he told Reuters 'Did I think about death? Yes, it did come to mind. I asked everyone for forgiveness, and recalled happy moments in my life. I wrote to my wife.' A verified video shot by a Severo-Kurilsk resident showed water engulfing a fish processing plant as it rushed inland, carrying a lightweight metal building and containers with it. A woman can be heard cursing as she laments the loss of the plant. "Our factory is sinking along with our seafood production," she says. Elsewhere on the Kamchatka Peninsula, video showed startled sea lions diving into the sea as the quake hit Antsiferov Island, just off the coast. The island is known as a natural habitat for Steller sea lions, a large, near-threatened species.
BBC News
13 hours ago
- BBC News
Japan's Fukushima plant workers evacuate after tsunami warning
Workers at Japan's embattled Fukushima nuclear plant were evacuated earlier on Wednesday after tsunami warnings were issued across the country. The plant's operator said all 4,000 of its workers had been evacuated, adding that there were no "abnormalities" comes after a massive 8.7 magnitude earthquake struck off Russia's far eastern coast, triggering warnings across the many in Fukushima prefecture, the warning is likely to bring back memories of one of the worst nuclear disasters the world has March 2011, Japan was hit by a devastating 9.0-magnitude earthquake and subsequent tsunami that went on to kill more than 18,000 tsunami flooded the plant, disabling its emergency generators and causing them to overheat - leading to a nuclear meltdown. Hundreds of tons of extremely hazardous material still remain at Fukushima - and the challenges and controversies surrounding it are still very much present even now, more than 14 years later. What happened at the Fukushima nuclear site? On 11 March 2011 at 14:46 local time (05:46 GMT) an earthquake - known as the Great East Japan Earthquake - struck east of the city of Sendai, just 97km (60miles) north of the power buildings at Fukushima were damaged by hydrogen explosions caused by the earthquake and tsunami. The tsunami knocked out cooling systems to the reactors, three of which melted plant also suffered a number of chemical explosions which badly damaged the buildings, and to make matters worse, radioactive material began leaking into the atmosphere and the Pacific government soon declared a 30km exclusion area around the plant, evacuating more than 150,000 people who were warned not to return due to radiation concerns. Even now, significant portions of the area are still restricted - with abandoned homes, empty neighbourhoods and faded storefronts to show for it. Why is it so hard to clean up the nuclear waste? A total of 880 metric tons of hazardous material - a mixture of melted nuclear fuel and reactor structures - still remain inside the Fukushima this debris from the reactors is seen as the biggest challenge towards safely decommissioning the plant. Tens of thousands of workers will be needed over the next 30 to 40 years to safely remove nuclear waste, fuel rods and more than one million tons of radioactive water still being kept at the site. The clean-up is also estimated to cost around 21.5tr yen ($145bn; 3109bn). Earlier this week, Tepco said the start of full-scale removal of melted fuel debris would be pushed back until 2037 or later - saying that preparations for this would require at least 12-15 years. The plan has already been delayed numerous times, and the latest delay is a major setback to a government plan to complete decommissioning by still maintains that it can achieve this but some experts have called this into question."Who really believes all 880 tons of debris can be removed in 14 years between 2037 and 2051? Maintaining an unrealistic goal is not good when considering Fukushima's recovery," Shunji Matsuoka, a professor of environmental economics and policy studies at Waseda University, had told local news outlet then there's the issue of water. Since the disaster, power plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings (Tepco) has been pumping in water to cool down the reactors' fuel rods. This means every day the plant produces contaminated water, which is stored in more than 1,000 tanks, enough to fill more than 500 Olympic swimming pools. But Japan needs the land occupied by the tanks to build new facilities to safely decommission the plant - and in 2023, it began releasing some of this treated wastewater into the ocean. The plan was met by a huge amount of criticism and controversy, despite the UN's atomic regulators saying it will have a "negligible" impact on people and the environment. Is Japan shifting back to nuclear power? In the wake of the Fukushima disaster, Japan initially started moving away from nuclear energy - but the government has slowly started to reverse this this year, Japan said it needed to rely on nuclear to meet growing demand from power-hungry sectors like AI and semiconductors, with an energy plan released calling for "maximising" nuclear this week, utility company Kansai Electric Power said it would look into whether it could build a new reactor - a project that had been suspended in the wake of Fukushima. But there has been local opposition to such plans - and Wednesday's tsunami alert is likely to heighten concerns. Japan's Meteorological Agency says tsunami waves have reached parts of the country's coast, including could reach as high as 3m (9ft) in such areas and thousands have been told to evacuate for their safety. Why do so many earthquakes happen in Japan? Japan's precarious location on the Ring of Fire means it experiences about 1,500 earthquakes a year. The looming threat of earthquakes is ever present. It is also widely considered to be among the most earthquake-prepared nations in the world. Its citizens begin taking part in earthquake drills from as early on as primary school and its buildings are designed to be earthquake resistant. Despite this, many in Japan remain fearful of the "big one" - a once-in-a-century quake that worst case scenarios predict could kill as many as 300,000 people, triggering tsunamis of up to 30m (100ft) along the country's Pacific coast. Experts say there is a 70% to 80% chance of a magnitude 8 or 9 quake striking somewhere along Japan's Nankai trough in the next 30 years.
