Shipbuilders in Murmansk put their faith in a 46-year-old floating dock

Shipowners in Murmansk are in dire need of new ship repair capacities as international sanctions have blocked their access to foreign yards.

A major upgrade of the Murmansk Ship Repair Company, a naval yard located near downtown Murmansk, will help meet the growing demands, regional authorities argue.

According to governor Andrei Chibis, the S7 Group and its leader Vladislav Filyev are among the investors. 

The PD-81 floating dock is part of the project.

The dock was towed from Zapadnaya Litsa, the nuclear submarine base, to Murmansk in the middle of August. Satellite images show that it was still moored next to piers for submarines on August 12, but that it had vanished two days later. On August 19, the Russian state port authority Rosmorport reported that it successfully had moved the installation to Murmansk.

The PD-81 floating dock was built in Trogir, Croatia, in 1979. It was acquired by Russian Navy in 1992. It has a carrying capacity of 29,300 tons. 

It is not clear if the dock has ever been used by the Russian Navy. It is believed to have been stationed in Zapadnaya Litsa ever since it came to the Kola Peninsula in 1992.

It is far from certain that the modernisation of the 46-year-old dock will be successful. People in Murmansk still remember how another aging dock, the 330 meters long PD-50, sank in 2018. Despite repeated calls for the lifting of the installation, it today remains on the bottom of the Kola Bay.

According to governor Chibis, the Murmansk Ship Repair Yard will soon get also a second floating dock. It will appear in Murmansk by the end of the year, and be "a unique and unparalleled dock in the entire Kola Bay area," he said.

It is not clear which dock the governor has in mind.

The Kola Peninsula is home base for a significant number of fishing vessels, as well as icebreakers and service ships run by nuclear power company Rosatomflot.

In addition comes the major number of ships operated by the Northern Fleet.

According to General Director Petr Matyushenko, the Murmansk Ship Repair Yard will serve as repair base for Rosatom's nuclear-powered icebreakers. 

The nuclear power company currently has to bring its new-generation nuclear icebreakers all the way to St.Petersburg for service and repair. The establishment of repair capacities in Murmansk has long been a priority for the company. But the international sanctions have put a stop to contracts with foreign yards.

The company signed a $68 million contract with Turkish Kuzey Star Shipyard in 2021 to built a new dock big enough to serve the new class of icebreakers. The dock, which has a lifting capacity of 30,000 tons, was completed in the fall of 2024 and towed out via the Bosphorus Strait to the Mediterranean.

The voyage was due to continue to Murmansk, but the UK's decision to sanction the tug that was towing the dock led to a full halt in the operation.

"UK sanctions have helped halt Putin’s plans to station a floating repair dock in the Arctic to service the precious icebreakers fleet," the Foreign Office in London said in a statement.

Without the Turkish-made dock, Rosatomflot today still depends on its two existing floating docks. One of them, the PD-3, is stationed in the port of Murmansk and is used to dock the nuclear icebreaker 50 Let Pobedy and third-party vessels. The other dock, the PD-0002, is stationed at the icebreaker's service base just north of Murmansk and used for docking the nuclear-powered icebreakers Yamal, Taymyr and Vaygach. 

For the new and bigger Arktika-class icebreaker, however, Rosatomflot has to sail thousands of kilometres to St.Petersburg.