Putin’s navy is now a spent force

David Axe-      In 2024, the Russian navy plans to take delivery of 12 new warships plus another 38 small craft, according to state media.

That’s two more warships than last year – and twice as many as the annual average for the preceding decade. And on paper, it’s two more warships than the world’s leading navy – the US Navy – plans to accept this year.

But in practice, Russia’s supposed watershed year for warship-construction is actually closer to a wash. With the exception of submarines, new Russian ships are small and lightly armed – and packed with potentially unreliable equipment such as maritime engines that Russian used to import from Ukraine, but now cobbles together on its own.

Worse, Russian shipbuilding barely keeps pace with Russian ship losses in Russia’s 28-month wider war on Ukraine. Ukrainian missiles and drone boats are sinking or blowing up Russian naval tonnage nearly as fast as Russia can build tonnage.

There are several ways to compare navies. One is to tally individual oceangoing hulls, regardless of the size of those hulls or what weapons they carry. Another is to add up how many missiles the fleet can carry, overall. A third is to count tonnage – that is, how many tons of water the whole fleet displaces.

Tonnage is a useful metric, as bigger ships tend to be more survivable and more heavily armed than potentially more numerous smaller warships. Which is why, even though the Chinese navy has more hulls than the US Navy – 350 Chinese warships to 290 American ones – the US Navy is still the more powerful navy, by far.

The US fleet displaces 8.2 million tons, while the Chinese fleet displaces 3.2 million tons. Not surprisingly, that superior tonnage also translates into heavier armament. American warships sail with around 9,900 missile cells or tubes. Chinese ships sail with just 4,200 cells or tubes – and Russian ships with just 3,000 or so.

Equally damning for Moscow, the US and Chinese navies are steadily growing in tonnage terms as bigger new ships replace smaller old ones. But the Russian navy is going in the opposite direction. Smaller new ships are replacing bigger old ones.

During the Cold War, the Russian navy was a true blue-water navy with ambitions to deploy surface ships and submarines all over the world. The surface ships included massive battlecruisers and cruisers as well as destroyers, frigates and even aircraft carriers.

But the Soviet surface shipbuilding industry collapsed when the Soviet Union did – and never really recovered. The biggest ships in Russian service – a handful of battlecruisers, cruisers and destroyers and a single decrepit aircraft carrier – are Soviet leftovers. And one of these holdovers, the cruiser Moskva, was hit and sunk by Ukrainian anti-ship missiles in 2022.