A fire broke out aboard Russia’s only aircraft carrier on Thursday but was quickly extinguished and caused no casualties, Russian state media reported.
This is the “Admiral Kuznetsov”, built in the 1980s, at the Black Sea Shipyards, in the city of Mykolaiv, in southern Ukraine, which was then part of the Soviet Union.
The ship suffered a small fire while being repaired at a shipyard in the Arctic port of Murmansk, Russian state agencies TASS and RIA Novosti reported.
The fire was extinguished quickly and caused no casualties, said the head of the state-owned United Shipbuilding Corporation (USC), Aleksey Rakhmanov, quoted by the two agencies.
USC is overseeing a major overhaul of the aircraft carrier.
Delays and accidents hampered the ongoing overhaul of the “Admiral Kuznetsov”, which began in 2017 and was initially scheduled to end in 2021, according to the US news agency AP.
At least one person died and 12 were injured after a fire in December 2019.
The previous year, a crane fell through the deck after a floating dock supporting it began to sink, causing unspecified damage, according to AP.
Rakhmanov told Russian media in June that he expected “Admiral Kuznetsov” to return to service in early 2024, almost three years late.
This aircraft carrier was the only one completed by the Soviet Union, which was building a second unit of the same class when it sank in 1991.
The aircraft carrier in question was owned by Ukraine, which sold it to China, now operating under the name “Liaoning”.
With a deck of 306 meters in length, the “Admiral Kuznetsov” has the capacity to transport 26 planes and 24 helicopters.
It has several missile launch systems and a crew of 1,960, including 518 officers.
It was first used in combat missions in Syria between November 2016 and January 2017, according to TASS.
At the time, its fighters carried out 420 missions and destroyed more than 1,200 infrastructure belonging to the Islamic State and Jabhat al-Nusra groups, considered terrorist organizations by Russia.
The “Admiral Kuznetsov” is part of the Northern Fleet and is the flagship of the Russian navy, according to TASS.
Source: TSF
