Admiral Kuznetsov, the Russian navy’s only aircraft carrier, hasn’t deployed in eight years—and it’s increasingly unlikely it will ever deploy again. That helps explain why, in recent months, the Kremlin reportedly reassigned the ageing ship’s sailors to the army—and sent them into battle in Ukraine.
It’s a startling revelation that underscores the Russian army’s manpower crisis as Russia’s wider war on Ukraine grinds toward its 31st month—and also underlines the decrepit state of the Russian navy’s biggest warships, most of which are Cold War leftovers.
Open-source analyst Moklasen first reported reassigning some of the 58,000-ton Kuznetsov’s approximately 1,500-person crew. After scouring Russian social media for clues, Moklasen concluded that the sailors formed a so-called “frigate” mechanized battalion within the 1st Guards Tank Army.
The frigate battalion fought around Kharkiv in northern Ukraine before shifting to the Pokrovsk axis in the east. Moklasen surmised that at least one former carrier crewman, Oleg Sosedov, went missing during a Russian attack in Kharkiv on July 23.
That the Russians are pulling people from Kuznetsov isn’t surprising. The Kremlin is taking extreme measures to mobilize the 30,000 fresh troops it needs every month just to replace battlefield losses—killed, wounded and captured—in Ukraine.
The alternative to, say, stripping away ship’s crews might be a nationwide draft, which would be politically risky for the regime of Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin.
And besides, the rickety Kuznetsov isn’t about to return to sea. The 39-year-old flattop was supposed to leave the port of Murmansk, in northern Russia, back in the spring for the first time in eight years. Instead, the carrier remains pierside in Murmansk, in northern Russia.
Kuznetsov completed just seven patrols since launching in 1985 and was commissioned into the Soviet navy six years later. During the flattop’s most recent deployment, off the coast of Syria in 2016, the air wing lost two of its 24 jets to accidents in just three weeks.
The crashes were the first in a long series of recent mishaps. Two years later in October 2018, Kuznetsov suffered severe damage when the drydock PD-50 sank while the carrier was aboard for repairs. Then, in December 2019, a fire broke out on Kuznetsov itself.
Fleet leaders considered decommissioning the damaged ship. Incredibly, the Kremlin opted to repair and modernize Kuznetsov instead. At the time, the plan was for Kuznetsov to return to sea in 2022. But another fire broke out in December 2022. Nearly two years later, the carrier is still stuck in port.
“The main issue is engines,” said Pavel Luzin, a Russia’s Perm University military expert. Ukrainian factories built most of the Soviet navy’s big marine engines. The Ukrainians no longer export these engines to Russia. And the Russians have struggled to set up local production of similar equipment.
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