New minesweeper is named after Soviet captain who commanded US-made naval vessel
The Sredne-Nevsky Shipyard in St. Petersburg has put the Dmitry Lysov on the water. The ship, which will be based in the Northern Fleet, is named after a captain who commanded one the USSR's many US-made minesweepers during 2WW.
The Dmitry Lysov is the 11th vessel of Russia's new generation of minesweepers. The Aleksandrit class (Project 1270) is built to strengthen the Navy's capacity to combat sea mines. It is reported to have remotely operated and autonomous underwater tools.
The new ship is the third minesweeper of the class that has been built for the Northern Fleet. When construction is completed, presumably in the summer of 2026, the ship will set the course towards its home base of Polyarny on the Barents Sea coast.
"This ship is an important part of our modernised navy," Mayor of St. Petersburg Aleksandr Beglov said in connection with the event at the Sredne-Nevsky Yard.
The Dmitry Lysov is named after the captain of the minesweeper T-120, a US-made ship of the Admirable class. It left the shipyard in the US in late December 1939 and arrived in Polyarny, Kola Peninsula, on February 31, 1944.
The T-120 was sunk by a German submarine in late September 1944. Captain Dmitry Lysov and most of the ship's crew died in the attack.
The minesweeper was one of 34 vessels of the kind that was sent to the Soviet Union during the Second World War as part of the Lend-Lease Act.
In his memoirs, Nikolai Khrushchev reportedly claimed that Stalin told him that Lend-Lease enabled the Soviet Union to defeat Germany.
In total, the US. deliveries to the USSR through Lend-Lease amounted to $11 billion in materials (equivalent to $152 billion in 2024). The deliveries included over 400,000 jeeps and trucks; 12,000 armoured vehicles, including 7,000 tanks; 11,400 aircraft and 1,75 million tons of food.
And 34 minesweepers.
Many of the deliveries were made to the north Russian ports of Murmansk and Arkhangelsk.
