Russia’s new landing ship Ivan Gren is ready for service. The government trials have been completed, and the official acceptance documents have been signed by the government representative, captain 1st rank Viktor Ivanov. That writes the Yantar Shipyard in a press release.
This deserves a genuine “finally”. Ivan Gren was ordered back in 2004, so it has taken 14 years to build the ship. I have addressed the ship’s problems before in this post after a helicopter crash during the sea trials. Most recently it attracted attention that there were serious problems with the ship’s ability to sail astern.
Ivan Gren has a displacement of 5,000 tons and a crew of 100 persons. It can carry 13 main tanks or 36 armored personnel carriers, and it can accommodate up to 300 marines. The second ship of the class, Petr Morgunov, has been under construction since 2015, and it will be the last ship in the series. Originally, it was expected that the Russian Navy would order six ships of this project, but they later changed their minds.
Now that the Navy has accepted the results of the sea trials, the ship will probably leave the Baltic soon. It is expected that Ivan Gren will be a part of the Northern Fleet.
Recently, the Russian government has sought to improve the performance of the shipbuilding sector. Controls have been improved to ensure that funding is withheld when the defense industry is unable to deliver on time, and last month Putin personally engaged in a critique of the United Shipbuilding Corporation (OSK) which has a particularly bad track record of delays.
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