The Russian navy will get a total of 26 new ships in 2018, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced this week at a reception honoring Moscow’s fleet.
In raw numbers, the Russian navy is adding ships faster than the U.S. and Chinese navies are doing. Putin is preparing for a naval war. But the kind of war Putin is preparing for might not be the same kind of war the United States expects.
At one level, Russia’s official shipbuilding numbers are deceptive. Putin included small boats and support vessels in his tally—ship types the U.S. Navy, for one, rarely bothers to include when it counts its own warships.
What’s more, Russia’s new ships on average are much smaller than new American and Chinese vessels, and are less capable of traveling long distances to fight overseas wars.
But all that might not matter. Experts told The Daily Beast that Putin’s new fleet is well suited to his increasingly aggressive foreign policy along Russia’s borders. “They are a land power after all,” Michael Kofman, a Russia expert with the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington, D.C., told The Daily Beast.
There are big vessels as well. The Russian navy still possesses large, Cold War-vintage warships that it’s upgrading, including an aircraft carrier and a nuclear-powered battlecruiser that’s one of the biggest surface warships in the world, plus an impressive force of submarines.