Construction of a new class of highly advanced warships for the Russian navy has been abandoned after shipbuilders were unable to find parts to replace foreign hardware cut off by Western sanctions over the Ukraine crisis, news agency RIA Novosti reported Wednesday.
"Currently two of the ships are being built at our shipyards, [but] apparently they will be the only two ships from this project," the marketing director of the Severnaya Verf shipyard, Leonid Kuzmin, told RIA Wednesday. The yard has had trouble finding replacements to Western components used in the design.
The Gremyashchy-class corvettes — a class of small warship — are derived from the older Steregushchy-class corvettes but built to allow longer missions and launch cruise missiles.
But these plans have been torpedoed by the realities of Russia's import substitution drive, which was intended to mitigate the effects of a Western arms embargo by spurring the development of comparable domestic equivalents.
Russian-made alternative components have been made for the two Gremyashchy-class ships already under construction, but Kuzmin said they are not as good as the Western hardware they replace, and the final eight vessels on order will be built as the normal Steregushchy-class corvettes the ships were based on.
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