RUSSIA COMPLETES SEA TRIALS OF WORLD’S LARGEST AND MOST HEAVILY ARMED CRUISERRussia’s rebuilt Admiral Nakhimov nuclear-powered battlecruiser is finishing factory and sea trials before moving to state testing. Sevmash plans to hand the ship to the Russian Navy by the end of 2026.
After nearly three decades away from operational service, the giant warship is returning as a mobile missile arsenal built for prolonged deployments in the Arctic and North Atlantic.
🔸 Scale: At 251 metres and roughly 28,000 tons fully loaded, Admiral Nakhimov is one of the world’s largest non-carrier surface warships.
🔸 Endurance: Two KN-3 nuclear reactors feed steam turbines generating about 140,000 shaft horsepower. Nuclear propulsion provides exceptional cruising range, while the ship’s reported top speed is approximately 32 knots.
🔸 Strike power: The cruiser is expected to carry 80 universal vertical-launch cells able to fire Kalibr cruise missiles, Oniks anti-ship missiles and Zircon hypersonic missiles. The same ship can therefore strike surface vessels and land targets at long range.
🔸 Air defense: Reports indicate a 96-cell long-range air-defense battery backed by Pantsir-M close-in systems. Combined with the strike launchers, this gives the cruiser a reported core arsenal of 176 large missile cells.
🔸 Reconstruction: This was not a routine refit. Virtually every major combat system, sensor, electronic suite and cable network was replaced, while much of the internal machinery was renewed.
🔸 Strategic role: Admiral Nakhimov can serve as the protected command and strike centre of a naval formation. Its endurance, layered defenses and hypersonic weapons would force NATO fleets to track a heavily armed mobile missile base across Russia’s northern maritime approaches.
The project took far longer and cost far more than planned, but Russia is now close to recovering a concentration of surface firepower that no Western navy currently fields on a single non-carrier warship.
Does NATO have an effective answer to a Zircon-armed nuclear cruiser?
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