Refurbished Soviet-era giant undergoes speed trials in the White Sea

The vessel was moved from its berth at the Sevmash shipyard in late May and put to sea on 31 May for the first round of sea trials this year.

According to Russia's Ministry of Transport, citing information from the Navy, the Admiral Nakhimov has "entered the final stage of testing following repairs and modernisation."

Norwegian naval analyst Thord Are Iversen identified the battlecruiser in satellite images taken over the White Sea on Saturday. The 251-metre-long warship was located north of Severodvinsk in Dvina Bay.

The shipyard has not officially commented on the vessel's current voyage.

The Soviet-built warship last sailed with the Northern Fleet in 1997. After spending two years laid up in Severomorsk, north of Murmansk, it was towed to Severodvinsk in 1999.

Following decades of refurbishment and modernisation, the battlecruiser is expected to provide the Northern Fleet with a heavily armed surface combatant equipped with an extensive arsenal of missiles, rockets, torpedoes and naval guns unmatched elsewhere in the Russian Navy.

Russia's Ministry of Defence has previously stated that the vessel will be armed with the Tsirkon hypersonic cruise missile. If launched from Russia's sector of the Barents Sea, the missile could fly over land and strike maritime targets in the Norwegian Sea, providing NATO forces with very little warning time.

Original plans called for the battlecruiser to return to service with the Northern Fleet in 2018. Progress, however, proved slow, and successive schedules for sea trials in the White Sea were repeatedly postponed. In 2022, officials stated that the vessel would be relaunched in 2023, only for a later announcement to push the target date back to autumn 2024.

As part of the upgrade programme, the fuel assemblies in the ship's two nuclear reactors were replaced. Reactor No. 1 was brought online in late December 2024, while Reactor No. 2 became operational in early February this year.

Although the uranium fuel is new and parts of the cooling system have been refurbished, the fundamental design of the two pressurised water reactors remains unchanged from when the vessel was built in the mid-1980s.

The nuclear propulsion plant has a thermal output of 300 MW and delivers approximately 140,000 horsepower.

The Admiral Nakhimov is expected to replace the Pyotr Velikiy, a sister ship of the same class that has been laid up at a pier in Severomorsk since autumn 2022. As previously reported by the Barents Observer, the Pyotr Velikiy is likely to be scrapped.