Putin Inspects the Arc7 LNG Carrier Pyotr Stolypin at the Zvezda Yard
Fifteen tankers were planned with Korean partners, and five are now being finished in the Russian Far East
Vladimir Putin visited the Zvezda shipyard at Bolshoy Kamen, across the Ussuriyskiy Zaliv from Vladivostok, on 2 September, inspecting the Arc7 class icebreaking LNG carrier Pyotr Stolypin.
The visit touched several of Russia's larger industrial projects at once. Putin has long supported the development of the Zvezda complex, which is closely tied to Arctic shipping and the Northern Sea Route, and the Far East is a region well outside the range of Ukrainian long-range strikes that have reached refineries and energy infrastructure elsewhere in the country.
The ship he inspected, IMO 9904675, is designed to operate year-round through the ice-bound seas of the 3,000 nautical mile Arctic corridor along Russia's northern coast. The route was navigable for only two months a year within living memory, but retreating ice has extended the season and it can now be kept open with nuclear-powered icebreakers.
She is one of five Arc7 tankers being built at Zvezda to serve the Arctic LNG 2 project on the Gydan Peninsula in western Siberia. The primary and closest destination terminal is Murmansk, though the ships are also designed to sail eastwards to a transshipment point in Kamchatka and onward to China. The fleet will be Russian-flagged and operated by Sovcomflot, and is based on a Korean 172,000 cubic metre design capable of operating through ice more than two metres thick.
The programme is a fraction of what was intended. Fifteen tankers were originally to be built in cooperation with Samsung and Hanwha Ocean, with French subcontractors. When the project was sanctioned, the order was cut back and the work transferred to Zvezda, leaving a technically demanding five-ship class to be completed by a yard that had to build specialist plants nearby to produce the azimuth thrusters the ships need, and a foundry at Primorye for large-format steel plate.
The gas project shrank in step. Only one of three planned liquefaction trains was completed before foreign partners withdrew and exports of specialised equipment were halted, curtailing both the scale of the development and, at least for now, the need for so many ice-class ships. The lead vessel of the class, Aleksey Kosygin, IMO 9904546, made her first voyage to Gydan in December 2025. Like Pyotr Stolypin she is already sanctioned by the US Treasury, and was last observed discharging at the Jinhai Heavy Industry facility in Zhoushan, China, on 25 August, a discharge pattern typical of a sanctioned vessel working outside conventional terminals.
While in the Vladivostok area, Putin also went aboard the newly launched deep-sea long-range freezer trawler Kapitan Yunak, IMO 9901178. At 9,055 gross tons she is among the largest and most sophisticated of her type, and although not yet sanctioned she is likely to range widely under the Russian flag.
