Russia admitted on Friday it would not be able to deliver to India by the year-end a refurbished but still-faulty Soviet-era aircraft carrier that has come to symbolize its recent military decline.
The December handover date for the 30-year-old Admiral Gorshkov — renamed the INS Vikramaditya by India since the agreement to purchase the carrier in 2004 — is set to be pushed back by nine months, a top shipping official said. “We expect to push back the aircraft carrier’s handover by nine months,” news agencies quoted Russia’s United Shipbuilding Corporation (OSK) Andrei Dyachkov as saying.
Reports have said that problems had developed on three of the eight boilers during testing. An explosion of one had put the ship out of commission in the 1990s before India considered the craft. Dyachkov said that other equipment had also failed during a test-run for the client — including items provided by NATO nations for their Asian military ally. The broken pieces included “three coolers, a nitrogen gas generator, and a range of other equipment,” OSK head Dyachkov reported to Deputy Prime Minister and the government’s military hardware pointman Dmitry Rogozin.
Defence Minister Anatoly Serdyukov said separately that a delay was now “likely” and lamented about the damage done to Russia’s once-proud military reputation.
“The fact that our quality is suffering — this really is a problem,” Serdyukov was quoted as saying. India and China remain Russia’s two biggest arms clients despite efforts by both countries to break ties with a partner that has proven increasingly unreliable in recent years. Russia supplies India with much of its air force but has been dragged into ugly spats over spare parts costs required to fix the rapid wear and tear of the machines.