LUKoil, Russia's largest privatized oil company, has entered a joint venture with the Murmansk Shipping Line to build a new generation of Russian ice-breaking tankers, a Murmansk Shipping official said Friday.


The ships would be the first Russian-owned tankers to sail the country's northern seas since the breakup of the Soviet Union, when Latvia's Baltic Shipping Line inherited all the ex-U.S.S.R.'s ice-breaking tankers along with other Baltic port equipment.


The company, LUKoil Arctic Tanker, plans to build five tankers within the next two years, each with a deadweight of 15,000 tons, and another 39 by the year 2,000, according to Nikolai Kulikov, chief engineer with the Murmansk Shipping Line.


The decision to build new tankers was prompted by the high cost of leasing foreign vessels, Kulikov said in a telephone interview from Murmansk. He said the Murmansk Shipping Line presently rents six tankers from Latvian and Finnish companies, paying up to $2.5 million per year for each ship.


"It is a catastrophe for Russia," Kulikov said. "We shall never have hard currency in the country if we pay money for something we can make ourselves."


Murmansk Shipping Line and LUKoil each have a 40 percent stake in the new joint venture, while 20 percent belongs to oil transport company Yakutnefteprodukt.


Kulikov said the company was in talks with the Russian government to obtain a tax-exempt oil export quota to fund the project. He said that the cost of each ice-breaking tanker amounted to $30 million, and that Russia needs at least 10 to transport oil products from Murmansk to far northern ports in the Yakutia, Krasnoyarsk and Arkhangelsk regions.


The ports that would be served by the specially designed ships are accessible to regular tankers only about 80 days out of each year.LUKoil Arctic Tanker plans to choose a contractor to build the tankers by the end of October, Kulikov said. He said that two Russian companies, along with a Ukrainian and a Finnish company had placed bids in a tender.