{"id":11664,"date":"2026-06-25T07:30:29","date_gmt":"2026-06-25T11:30:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/?p=11664"},"modified":"2026-06-25T05:48:07","modified_gmt":"2026-06-25T09:48:07","slug":"russia-nuclear-attack-submarine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/russia-nuclear-attack-submarine\/","title":{"rendered":"Russia just started building its ninth 13,800-ton Yasen-M nuclear attack submarine, a hypersonic missile carrier crewed by just 64 sailors and designed to hit land from so far out it never has to swim through the chokepoint NATO spent decades guarding"},"content":{"rendered":"

Russia\u2019s surface fleet has spent the last few years looking like a cautionary tale. The Black Sea Fleet\u2019s flagship cruiser is on the bottom off Crimea, corvettes keep catching drone hits and tucking back into port<\/a>, and the survivors spend a lot of time tied up where it\u2019s safe. The submarine arm keeps quietly doing the opposite.<\/p>\n

On June 17, at the Sevmash yard in Severodvinsk, Moscow lit the welding torches on its ninth Yasen-M nuclear attack boat, a 13,800-ton missile carrier called Murmansk built from the start to haul Zircon hypersonic cruise missiles into the North Atlantic.<\/p>\n

This is the first new Yasen-M to enter construction in six years, and the timing isn\u2019t subtle. Per the statement put out by Russia\u2019s Defense Ministry<\/a>, the keel went down at Severodvinsk on June 17, 2026, the first laid under a fresh contract since the previous pair started back in 2020. That says the Kremlin is still willing to bankroll decade-long capital projects even while its ammunition lines run flat out for Ukraine. The ceremony itself was a who\u2019s-who of naval brass and shipbuilding chiefs, which is what you do when you want an announcement to carry.<\/p>\n

Sevmash lit the torches on June 17, and the brass showed up<\/h2>\n

The boat got its name by direct order of Admiral of the Fleet Aleksandr Moiseyev, the Russian Navy\u2019s Commander-in-Chief, who set the keel plate alongside United Shipbuilding Corporation chief Andrei Puchkov and Sevmash director Mikhail Budnichenko. Naval Today<\/a> reports the ceremony formally started construction of the ninth boat in the modernized Yasen-M series, designed by the Malakhit bureau and assigned factory number 169.<\/p>\n

The name is loaded on purpose. Murmansk honors the Hero City of the same name, and the previous bearer was a Soviet Project 949 cruise-missile boat, K-206, also built at Sevmash. Soviet symbolism plus a fresh Arctic hull is exactly the kind of messaging Moscow likes to push out of its northern yards.<\/p>\n

Moiseyev also used the moment to set a pace, saying the program now calls for keel-layings like this one to be carried out \u201cannually\u201d<\/a> to feed the Northern and Pacific Fleets. For context on how rare that boast is, only six countries build nuclear submarines at all, so the part about not everyone being able to do this happens to be true.<\/p>\n

Where Murmansk fits in the pecking order<\/h2>\n

Headline math first. Counting the lead Project 885 boat Severodvinsk, Murmansk is the tenth hull in the wider Yasen family and the ninth of the modernized 885M variant. The Barents Observer puts five Yasen-class boats already in service, three with the Northern Fleet and two with the Pacific Fleet, with another five at various stages of construction at Sevmash and two more penciled in for 2027 and 2028.<\/p>\n

The boat that actually matters for the Zircon story isn\u2019t Murmansk, though. It\u2019s Perm. Defence Blog<\/a> reports Perm is in trials and expected in service by the end of this year, reportedly headed for the Pacific Fleet, and Vladimir Putin said at its March 2025 rollout that it will be the first Russian multipurpose sub to carry Zircon as standard kit.<\/p>\n

The rest of the order book is Ulyanovsk under construction, plus Voronezh and Vladivostok, the pair laid down in July 2020 and due later this decade, assuming the timelines hold, which Russian shipbuilding timelines have a long history of not doing. So Murmansk is the headline, but the milestone everyone\u2019s really watching is Perm hitting the water with hypersonic missiles bolted in from day one.<\/p>\n

\n
\n
Displacement<\/div>\n
13,800 t<\/div>\n
Full submerged.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
Length<\/div>\n
426 ft<\/div>\n
130 m long, ~13 m beam.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
Crew<\/div>\n
64<\/div>\n
Less than half a Virginia-class.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
Strike battery<\/div>\n
8 \u00d7 SM-346<\/div>\n
Up to 32 Oniks\/Zircon or 40 Kalibr.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
Torpedo tubes<\/div>\n
10 \u00d7 533 mm<\/div>\n
Mounted amidships.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
Max depth<\/div>\n
600 m<\/div>\n
Working depth 520 m.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
HYPERSONIC<\/div>\n
Zircon 3M22<\/div>\n
~Mach 9<\/div>\n
Range near 1,000 km.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

The 13,800-ton spec sheet<\/h2>\n

The hull numbers are public and line up across sources. The Yasen-M runs 426 feet (130 meters) stem to stern, about 13 meters in the beam, with a full submerged displacement of 13,800 tons. That makes it one of the largest attack boats in service anywhere, and a lot of that size is sonar. The forward section is built around the big spherical Irtysh-Amfora array, which is also why the torpedo room got shoved aft instead of sitting up in the nose like on older Soviet boats.<\/p>\n

The endurance figures are spelled out too: a stated maximum diving depth of 600 meters, a working depth of 520 meters, and up to 100 days submerged before the boat has to come home. The crew count is the real tell. Sixty-four sailors run a 13,800-ton nuclear submarine, less than half the roughly 130 it takes to crew one of the U.S. Navy\u2019s Virginia-class boats<\/a>, which says a lot about how much automation the Russians packed in.<\/p>\n

Zircon is the new variable, and it\u2019s a real one<\/h2>\n

The main strike battery is eight SM-346 vertical launch modules, the same UKSK system the class has carried since Kazan. According to the Royal United Services Institute<\/a>, each module holds either five Kalibr cruise missiles or four P-800 Oniks anti-ship rounds, which works out to as many as 40 Kalibrs or 32 Oniks across the boat, and the same cells take the Zircon. Add the ten 533mm torpedo tubes amidships and you have a platform that doubles as a hunter-killer and a long-range missile barge.<\/p>\n

The 3M22 Zircon is what changes the math. Russia puts its top speed at around Mach 9 with a range near 1,000 kilometers (about 620 miles); Western analysts tend to land lower, somewhere in the Mach 6 to 8 band depending on the flight profile. Either way it\u2019s built to skim low and arrive inside the window most current missile defenses need to work up a firing solution. And this isn\u2019t a paper capability anymore.<\/p>\n

The submarine Severodvinsk already test-fired Zircons back in October 2021, from both surfaced and submerged positions in northern waters, so the integration has been proven. It\u2019s the same cheap-shot-at-sea logic two American startups are chasing with a hypersonic on an uncrewed boat<\/a>, just bolted into a 13,800-ton nuclear hull instead.<\/p>\n

Whether that turns into a working at-sea capability across the Yasen-M fleet in real numbers is a separate question. Perm has to finish trials and actually enter service, then the doctrine has to catch up. Murmansk itself won\u2019t see water for years.<\/p>\n

Zapadnaya Litsa puts this boat at NATO\u2019s doorstep<\/h2>\n

The Yasen-M force is based at Zapadnaya Litsa, the Northern Fleet pen that sits closer to the Norwegian border than any other Russian submarine base on the Barents Sea coast. That geography is the whole Atlantic angle. RUSI\u2019s read is the sharp part: because these boats can strike land targets from very long range, they may not need to run the GIUK gap at all to do their job, which quietly undercuts the barrier-defense strategy NATO has leaned on for decades. You can\u2019t bottle up a submarine at a chokepoint it has no reason to swim through.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also a boat Pentagon planners have been nervous about for a while. The National Interest<\/a> notes that Pentagon officials told 60 Minutes the lead boat Severodvinsk slipped into the Atlantic in 2018 and went unfound for weeks, with one U.S. admiral calling it \u201cvery capable, and it\u2019s very quiet.\u201d Whether you take that straight or read some ASW-budget drum-banging into it, the Yasen-M is the boat NATO actually games out, and it lands in the middle of a wider scramble to solve the problem of finding quiet submarines<\/a> before they get where they\u2019re going.<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t expect Murmansk in the water any time soon<\/h2>\n

Here\u2019s where the keel-laying photo op runs into industrial reality. Yasen-M construction is slow even when the money flows, and the realistic in-service window for Murmansk lands in the early 2030s based on how long the earlier boats took. The lead boat Severodvinsk was laid down in December 1993 and didn\u2019t enter service until 2014. The first Yasen-M, Kazan, ran from July 2009 to May 2021. Even Perm, the program\u2019s current success story, was rolled out in March 2025 and is still in trials.<\/p>\n

So the ceremony tells you about Russian intent and shipyard capacity, not about a new boat showing up off Iceland next summer. What it does signal is that the program isn\u2019t quietly winding down to free up cash for artillery shells. Moiseyev wants keel-layings on an annual cadence, two more boats are penciled in for 2027 and 2028, and that\u2019s a long-term bet on undersea hypersonic strike at exactly the moment Russia\u2019s surface navy is having its worst decade since 1991. Which tells you which arm of the fleet Moscow still trusts with its money.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Russia laid the keel of Murmansk, its ninth Yasen-M nuclear attack submarine, on June 17 at Sevmash \u2014 a 13,800-ton hypersonic-armed boat built for the Atlantic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":11675,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[121],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11664","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-industry","resize-featured-image"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11664","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11664"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11664\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11674,"href":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11664\/revisions\/11674"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11675"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11664"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11664"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11664"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}