Paul Goble
Staunton, Aug. 15 – Despite Moscow claims, Russia’s icebreaker fleet is suffering from one problem after another (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2024/07/moscow-facing-growing-problems-with-its.html and windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2025/07/russias-much-ballyhooed-new-nuclear.html).
The Accounting Chamber is reporting the latest and most devasting. It found that the Russian government allocated more than nine billion rubles (90 million US dollars) to begin work on two new icebreakers in 2021 but that none of this money has gone to its intended use since (on-news.ru/obshhestvo/ostalis-bez-ledokolov-smi-rasskazal).
In reporting this development, the Parlamentskaya Gazeta did not say whether the money had been diverted to other uses by shipbuilders, siphoned off by corruption, or been held back by the central authorities to help finance Vladimir Putin’s expensive expanded war in Ukraine..
But the upshot of this is that Russia will be unlikely to build the icebreaker fleet that Putin and his team have repeatedly suggested is their goal, something that will limit Moscow’s ability to prevent other countries, and China in the first instance, from stealing a march on the Russian Federation on the Northern Sea Route.
At present, Moscow and Beijing are cooperating; and so many are likely to conclude that this cutback in Russian icebreaker construction will not have any serious consequences. But if China comes to dominate that route as far as icebreakers are concerned, the balance of power there almost certainly will change.
On that probability, see jamestown.org/program/moscows-cutback-on-icebreaker-construction-opens-door-for-china-in-the-north/ and jamestown.org/program/china-helping-russia-on-northern-sea-route-now-but-ready-to-push-moscow-aside-later/.
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