Russia To Build Six New Series Patrol Vessels By 2020

Russia will build new series of six patrol vessels for Black Sea Fleet and two patrol ships for the Arctic by 2020.

The first of these patrol vessels will be delivered to Black Sea Fleet in the next three years.

"Along with this new series of six ships for the Black Sea Fleet, two more patrol ships of the ice-breaker type will be built for the use in the Arctic zone," Russian Navy Commander Viktor Chirkov was quoted as saying by Tass on Sunday, adding that these two ships would be built in 2019 and 2020.

The ships will have characteristics of a patrol ship, an ice-breaker and a tugboat. They will also be used to escort civil ships to protect them against pirate attacks and for Naval capabilities.

"The ships will be able of long-term staying at any area of the World Ocean with possible rotation of the crew and shipyard checks at any port, including some foreign ports," he said.

"Now it is up to industrial enterprises to meet our technical requirements. Luckily, now we have a possibility to choose options from among the ones offered by manufacturers," he added.

Russian Navy will also modernize about ten nuclear-powered submarines of project 971 and 949.

"Everything will be new there. All the units, mechanisms, radio electronics," Chirkov said.

The modernized vessels will practically be new nuclear submarines in terms of onboard equipment and weapons, he said.

"Surface ships and submarines will be built under a technology to make it easier to equip them with new weapons when necessary. Ships of these projects have enormous potential for modernization and we will make use of that," Chirkov said.

"Along with that, nuclear submarines of the fifth generation are being designed. I can say they will have wider capabilities," he said.