Did Russia Just Build the World’s Most Expensive Target?

The Military Show

After a staggering 27-year refit, Russia’s Cold War battlecruiser Admiral Nakhimov has finally completed sea trials. Packed with nearly 180 missile cells and nuclear power, the 28,000-ton monster is one of the most heavily armed surface combatants on Earth. Yet after billions in cost overruns and the harsh lessons of the Moskva sinking, did Moscow build an ultimate Arctic flagship—or merely the world’s most expensive target?  ⏱️ CHAPTERS: 00:00 - Admiral Nakhimov Completes 27 Year Russian Navy Refit 01:25 - Soviet Kirov Class Battlecruiser Abandoned After 1999 Collapse 02:45 - Russia Begins 1.5 Billion Dollar Battlecruiser Modernization 04:15 - Russia Sacrifices Pyotr Velikiy for 5 Billion Dollar Refit 05:40 - Upgraded Admiral Nakhimov Carries 180 Zircon Missile Cells 07:10 - Admiral Nakhimov Northern Fleet Mission Protecting Nuclear Submarines 08:40 - Why Sinking of Moskva Exposes Russian Warship Vulnerabilities 10:10 - Ukrainian Naval Drone Boats Threaten Massive Russian Surface Ships 11:40 - Is Admiral Nakhimov Russia's Most Expensive Naval Target?  Support us directly as we bring you independent, up-to-date reporting on military news and global conflicts by clicking here: https://www.youtube.com/@TheMilitaryShow/join  #militarystrategy #militarydevelopments #militaryanalysis #themilitaryshow  SOURCES: https://pastebin.com/yaGDePa0

Transcript

00:0027 years. That's how long it took Russia to turn one Cold War battle cruiser back into a warship.

00:06And by the time it finally happened in June of 2026, the world had changed around it.

00:12But that was the easy part. We're talking about the Admiral Nakimov,

00:16a 28,000 ton nuclear powered missile cruiser that just wrapped up the final phase of its sea trials

00:22after a refit that took so long that sailors who will crew it were born after the ship was already

00:28sitting in a shipyard rusting. Today, we're asking the question Russia's own state media would very

00:33much like us not to ask. Did the Kremlin just field one of the most heavily armed surface combatants

00:38on the planet? Or did it spend billions of dollars and nearly three decades building the world's most

00:44expensive target? Let's start with what this ship actually is. The Admiral Nakimov is one of four

00:50Kirov-class battle cruisers built by the Soviet Union, absolute monsters of the sea designed

00:55to hunt and kill American carrier strike groups on the open ocean. She was laid down in the 1980s

01:01and commissioned in 1988 under her original name, Kalinin. She then served for about a decade with

01:06the Soviets and then Russian Navy before being towed into the Seth Mass shipyard up in Severodavinsk in

01:121999. Back then, it was billed as a routine overhaul. Nobody involved in that decision could have imagined

01:19that routine overhaul would still be dragging on in the 2020s. To understand why the Nakimovs sat there

01:25for so long, you have to understand just how broke and disorganized Russia was in the years after the

01:30Soviet collapse. The economy was in shambles, the ruble was worthless, and the naval command was left

01:36holding a fleet of extremely expensive Soviet toys with no money to maintain any of them. On top of that,

01:42a lot of the industrial base that actually built and serviced these ships wasn't even inside the new

01:47Russian Federation anymore. The Admiral Kuznetsov, Russia's only aircraft carrier, was built in a

01:53Ukrainian shipyard, and Russia basically had to make do after the Soviet breakup. So when a hole like

01:59the Nakimov needed serious structural work, Russia didn't have the money and didn't fully have the

02:03means to do it properly. There were half-hearted conversations about restarting work in the 2000s,

02:09but nothing serious happened until the 2010s. The real modernization effort finally got a signature

02:15in 2013, with a formal contract worth about 50 billion rubles, roughly $1.5 billion at the time.

02:22The plan was about as ambitious as naval refits get. Instead of patching up old Soviet systems,

02:27engineers were going to gut the entire interior of the ship down to the bare hull,

02:31tear out miles of decaying Soviet-era wiring, rip out the obsolete missile tubes, and essentially

02:37rebuild a brand new warship. Moscow proudly announced the ship would be back in the fleet by 2018.

02:43That deadline, as you probably already guessed, came and went without so much as a splash.

02:48What actually happened once the shipyard workers started digging into that hull,

02:52is a picture-perfect example of how badly a project can spiral once reality meets Soviet engineering.

02:59Structural frames that had been corroding quietly for decades needed to be replaced entirely.

03:04Welding techniques required to work on a hull of this age and size turned out to be far more

03:08specialized and time-consuming than planned. And perhaps the biggest headache of all was trying

03:13to bolt modern radar arrays and combat systems onto a superstructure that was designed around

03:18analog Cold War electronics. Every one of those problems pushed the timeline back further.

03:232018 became 2021, which became 2023, which became 2025. And here we are in 2026, watching a ship that was

03:33supposed to be finished before some of its future crew were even born. The costs followed the same

03:39trajectory as the timeline, which is to say straight up and to the right. That original 50 billion ruble

03:45contract eventually ballooned by roughly 400%, with unofficial estimates putting the final bill

03:51somewhere around 200 billion rubles. Convert that into dollars at anything close to a realistic exchange

03:57rate. And unofficial estimates place total costs somewhere between roughly two to five billion dollars,

04:02years, depending on whose estimate you trust and when you're measuring it, spent on refitting a single

04:07hull. For context, that's enough money that could have gone a long way toward building or arming several

04:12smaller, more modern vessels, instead of pouring it all into one irreplaceable ship. And when the money

04:18for one ship starts spiraling that badly, something else usually has to give. In this case, it was the

04:24Nakimov's own sister ship, the Piotr Veliki, or Peter the Great, the fourth and last operational Kirov-class

04:30cruiser still nominally in service. As the Nakimov's refit ate up more and more of the Russian Navy's

04:36budget, plans to modernize the Piotr Veliki were quietly shelled. Russia effectively cannibalized

04:42one flagship's future to pay for the other's resurrection. So, even before we get to the

04:47question of combat effectiveness, there's a strategic cost here. The Soviet Union's original fleet of four

04:52Kirov-class monsters is now down to essentially one that anyone is planning to actually operate,

04:58since the Admiral Lazareff was scrapped back in 2021 and the Piotr Veliki is likely being

05:03decommissioned after Nakimov returns to service. And even that's up for debate, as a report from

05:092023 suggested that the ship might be kept in service regardless. But beyond the ship's history,

05:15let's talk about what nearly three decades and several billion dollars actually bought,

05:20because on paper, the Admiral Nakimov looks almost unstoppable. The original Nakimov was built

05:25to carry 20 P-700 granite anti-ship missiles, the weapons Soviet naval doctrine built entirely

05:31around, designed to launch mass strikes against American carrier battle groups from long range.

05:37Every single one of those launchers has been removed. In their place, engineers installed a

05:42universal vertical launch system, reportedly around 80 cells across 10 modules, capable of firing

05:48caliber land attack and anti-ship cruise missiles, P-800 Onyx anti-ship missiles and potentially the

05:553M-22 Zircon hypersonic missile. Add in the ship's long range air defense cells and total missile

06:01capacity across the vessel is estimated at roughly 170 to 180 missile cells. Whatever the exact final

06:09number turns out to be once she's fully accepted into service, this isn't a ship you want sailing towards

06:14you with hostile intent. The ship also runs on a combined nuclear and steam propulsion system,

06:20meaning her two KN-3 nuclear reactors give her essentially unlimited range and endurance,

06:26which matters enormously for the mission Russia actually has her in mind for,

06:30which we'll get to in a moment. Those reactors, by the way, sat cold for so long that restarting them

06:35was itself treated as a milestone, with the two reactors brought back online in December of 2024

06:40and February of 2025 respectively, more than a decade after the modernization contract was signed.

06:47The ship didn't even leave Sevmash for its first trials until August 2025, and it didn't enter what

06:53the Russian Ministry of Transport called its final phase of sea trials until June 2026, after departing

07:00the shipyard in late May. Satellite trackers have spotted her running speed and navigation trials in the

07:05White Sea, throwing up a healthy wake as she puts the systems through their paces. If everything

07:10goes according to plan from here, and given this ship's history, that's a fairly large if,

07:15the Admiral Nakimov could formally enter service with Russia's northern fleet sometime later in 2026

07:21or into 2027. So here's the part Russian state media is going to lean on hard, and the part we

07:27need to

07:28push back on a little. This ship is not being positioned as a Black Sea combatant, and it's not being

07:32sent

07:33anywhere near Ukraine's coastline. Its intended role is as the flagship of the northern fleet,

07:38based around the Kola Peninsula, with the mission tied directly to protecting Russia's sea-based nuclear

07:44deterrent. Russia's ballistic missile submarines operate out of that region, and in wartime they're

07:49expected to retreat into heavily protected bastions in the Barents and Kara seas. The Nakimov's job,

07:55with its nuclear-powered endurance and its massive air defense loadout, is to help guard that bastion and

08:00screen those submarines from NATO submarines, aircraft and surface ships. It is, in other words,

08:06being built for an entirely different war than the one currently raging in the Black Sea. Which brings

08:11us to the actual title of this video, and the uncomfortable argument that a growing number of

08:16naval analysts have been making since this ship first left the shipyard. Even considering that

08:21Nakimov's real job is arctic defense and not power projection in the Black Sea, the broader logic of

08:26pouring this much money and firepower into one irreplaceable hull runs directly against everything

08:31the war in Ukraine has taught the world about naval warfare over the last four years. For that, we need

08:37to talk about the cruiser Moskva. But before we do that, make sure to subscribe to the military show. We

08:43make daily videos that cover the history, present and future of warfare. In April 2022, Moskva was the

08:50flagship of Russia's Black Sea Fleet, a Slava-class missile cruiser that Russian sailors and propagandists

08:56alike treated as untouchable. Ukraine hit her were two domestically produced Neptune anti-ship missiles,

09:02and she sank, becoming the largest warship lost in combat by any navy in decades. The missiles that did

09:08it cost a tiny fraction of what the ship itself was worth, and the sinking clearly demonstrated the

09:13nature of the entire war, where big, expensive, prestige surface combatants were no longer the

09:18untouchable status symbols navies like to imagine them as. Now, to be fair to the Nakimov, she's not

09:24the Moskva. The upgraded air defense suite is considerably more capable, with dozens of long-range air

09:29defense cells, specifically meant to intercept exactly the kind of threats that killed Moskva,

09:34aircraft, cruise missiles and drones. Russian messaging around this consistently frames Nakimov as the

09:41direct answer to the Moskva humiliation. But here's the problem with that argument. Moskva wasn't sunk

09:47because Russia had bad missile defense doctrine on paper. She was sunk in large part because of

09:52failures in situational awareness, damage control and fire suppression once she was hit. Reports at

09:57the time described a fire that spread largely unchecked before triggering magazine explosions

10:02that ultimately doomed the ship. Adding more interceptor missiles to a hull doesn't necessarily

10:07fix any of that. Arguably, if Russia had genuinely learned the lesson of Moskva, the smarter investment

10:12would have been in survivability and damage control systems rather than piling yet more offensive missile

10:17capacity onto an already enormous target. Then there's the concentration problem, and this is

10:23really the heart of the world's most expensive target argument. A navy built around a small number

10:28of irreplaceable capital ships is inherently brittle. Every ruble and every missile packed into the

10:34Nakimov is capability that exists in exactly one place at one time, and none of it survives if that

10:40one hull goes down. Remember, Russia doesn't have a production line quietly building more Kirov-class

10:45cruisers in the background. The Nakimov could become the only operational Kirov-class cruiser

10:50if Piotr Veliki is retired as currently expected. If Nakimov is lost, damaged badly enough to need years

10:56of repair, or simply proves unreliable, Russia doesn't have a sister ship sitting nearby ready to pick up the

11:02slack. The entire Kirov-class experiment effectively lives or dies with a single vessel. And that concentration

11:09risks lands in a war where Ukraine has spent four years proving, again and again, that it doesn't

11:14need a traditional navy to make life miserable for Russian warships. Ukraine's own major service

11:19combatant, the frigate Hetman-Sahai-Dachnyi, was scuttled in the opening days of the war,

11:24specifically to keep it out of Russian hands. And yet, despite starting the war with essentially no

11:29blue-water navy at all, Ukraine has managed to drive the entire Russian Black Sea fleet into hiding.

11:34Following the Moskva sinking and a wave of uncrewed surface vessel strikes, including a notable attack

11:40on the naval base at Novorossiysk, Russian warships have been effectively confined to port, submarines

11:46included, with crews reportedly even submerging their boats at the pier, just to reduce their visibility

11:51to drone reconnaissance. Analysts covering the Black Sea campaign have described those

11:55protective harbour walls at Novorossiysk as functionally turning into a cage for the fleet

12:00hiding behind them. The tools that did most of that work weren't a sophisticated new missile system,

12:05but cheap, largely uncrewed drone boats, essentially explosive-packed jet skis with a camera and a radio

12:11link, built and iterated rapidly, and thrown at Russian ships and infrastructure in waves.

12:17And that's really the uncomfortable core of the argument against ships like Nakimov in 2026.

12:22These uncrewed threats share one huge advantage, they're expendable. Nobody, not even Russian military

12:28bloggers, is going to celebrate footage of 40 Ukrainian drones getting shot down.

12:33But air defence only has to fail once, and the ship that took 27 years and billions of dollars to

12:38build is gone, while the weapon that did it might cost a few thousand dollars to manufacture,

12:43and required no crew to risk. That asymmetry, cheap and expendable versus expensive and irreplaceable,

12:49is exactly what's already humbled a Russian fleet once in this war, and it's the same problem

12:53that Nakimov steps into the moment it enters full service. Now, geography still matters. Nakimov is

13:00heading to the Northern Fleet, patrolling Arctic and sub-Arctic waters around the Kola Peninsula,

13:05nowhere near the range of the small drone boats that have terrorized Russia's Black Sea fleet.

13:10Ukraine's naval drone campaign has been confined to the Black Sea, built around geography, proximity,

13:15and a very specific set of targets tied to the blockade of Ukrainian ports and the Crimean

13:20Peninsula. But even if Nakimov never sees a Ukrainian drone boat in its operational life,

13:26the same fundamental vulnerability exists wherever it sails, because modern anti-ship missiles,

13:31long-range strike drones and submarines don't respect the Arctic as some kind of safe harbour

13:36either, and Russia's northern fleet has hardly been immune to Western surveillance and NATO

13:41submarine activity for decades. What the Ukraine war really exposed wasn't a Black Sea problem

13:46specifically. Instead, it laid the groundwork for a different kind of naval power, one where the

13:52weapons are decentralised and limited to expendable, or at least relatively inexpensive drones.

13:57That's precisely because putting the Navy's capability into one irreplaceable hull creates a

14:02single point of failure, and one that foreign navies would be all too eager to abuse.

14:07It's also worth sitting with just how strange the numbers here really are, once you line them up

14:11side by side. A ship laid down in the 1980s, mothball for a full two decades before serious work even

14:18began, refit for over a decade after that, at a final cost that by some estimates approaches $5 billion.

14:25That's a sum of money that could have funded a genuinely modern fleet of frigates or corvettes,

14:29vessels that are far cheaper to build, far easier to replace if lost, and arguably far better suited to

14:35the kind of distributed, sensor-heavy, drone-saturated naval warfare that's actually defined this war.

14:41Instead, Russia chose to pour it all into resurrecting a single Cold War hull, because that hull already

14:47existed, half-finished, sitting at Sevmash, and finishing it made for a cleaner propaganda story

14:52than starting something new from scratch. There's a certain grim logic to that decision,

14:57sunk cost is a hell of a drug, but it's not obviously a strategy anyone would choose if they

15:01were designing a navy from first principles today. It's also worth remembering that Nakimov isn't

15:07entering an empty stage. NATO has been steadily increasing its own attention of the Arctic and

15:12the waters the northern fleet calls home, with more frequent submarine patrols, expanded surveillance,

15:17and closer cooperation between Nordic navies since Finland and Sweden joined the alliance.

15:22A single battle cruiser, however heavily armed, doesn't erase any of that pressure, and it doesn't

15:27give Russia anything close to sea control in the region where NATO submarines have operated for

15:32decades. If anything, Nakimov's real contribution may simply be forcing NATO planners to account for

15:38one more heavily armed hull in their targeting math, rather than fundamentally shifting the balance

15:43of power in the Arctic. Naval analysts covering this refit have not been shy about drawing that

15:48conclusion. Some went on to describe the entire program as bearing all the hallmarks of a so-called

15:54prestige or vanity project, one where the perception of strength matters more than actual

15:58combat effectiveness. The argument is that Nakimov's realistic future is less about decisive naval

16:04combat and more about flag showing, demonstration cruises, and appearing impressively in naval parades

16:10and propaganda broadcasts. It's the exact kind of role that lets the Kremlin claim victory over a troubled

16:15program without ever actually testing the ship against a peer threat. Given how badly Russia's only

16:21aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, continues to embarrass the navy with fires, crane collapses,

16:26and dry dock disasters, it's hard not to see why the Kremlin is eager for literally any large warship

16:32it can point to and call a symbol of restored Russian naval might, regardless of its actual usefulness.

16:38Then there's the harsh reality that after all that refit, Nakimov doesn't really change the broader

16:43numbers game between Russia and NATO at sea. It's just one ship, and it can't be reproduced from scratch.

16:49The capability to do a refit doesn't solve Russia's problem where shipyards are churning out warship

16:54after warship to patrol the oceans. Nakimov is basically a single, highly specialized,

17:00extremely expensive asset, optimized for a fairly narrow mission. And worse yet,

17:05Russia is mostly going to parade around as proof of its navy can still finish a mega project,

17:10conveniently glossing over just how badly that same project went for the better part of three decades.

17:15So, back to our original question. Did Russia actually pull off something genuinely ambitious

17:21here, or did it spend the better part of 30 years and several billion dollars building the world's

17:26most expensive target? The honest answer is probably somewhere uncomfortably in between.

17:31If the specifications and open source data are to be believed, Nakimov is still an extraordinarily

17:36capable warship, and arguably one of the most heavily armed warships in existence. But there's the

17:42sheer scale of the investment, the decades of delay, the sacrificing of another similar ship to meet

17:47ever-changing deadlines, and the fact that it enters service in the middle of a war that it will do

17:52absolutely nothing in. In the end, it might be an expensive target that Ukraine, as evidenced by

17:58its ramped up attacks on Russian ships, can't resist. Now, to learn more, check out this video,

18:04and make sure to like and subscribe to stay up to date with all the news of the war on

18:08Ukraine

18:08as it unfolds on the sea, over land, and in the air.

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