Every Cold War has its own version of The Hunt for Red October, and an updated version takes place on the waves of the Mediterranean. With the arrival of the frigate “Admiral Gorshkov” from the Strait of Gibraltar, the Russians are actually conducting a demonstrative operation in favor of the European public. The Russian ship will sail near Allied territorial waters, including Italian ones, in a show of force warning western capitals. If in the 1980s the greatest naval threat to the Atlantic Alliance was indeed Soviet submarines, in the 1920s NATO fleets will be met by a fleet of state-of-the-art Russian surface ships, armed with a deadly weapon against which it has yet to be defeated no countermeasures have been developed there – the Zircon hypersonic missile.
At least that is the narrative being promoted by the Kremlin, whose ambition is to be able to return to a situation of basic strategic parity with Washington and Brussels. Beyond the propaganda, the truth is a little different. The Russian fleet (Voennoy morskoy flot or Vmf) is largely inferior to its Western counterparts in terms of operational capability and technological level. Nearly a decade of sanctions has had a devastating impact on Russia’s shipbuilding industry, which had already suffered in a state of neglect compared to land, air and missile forces. Although they are equipped with nuclear submarines and are the third largest navy in the world in terms of tonnage, many ships of the VMF are technically and structurally obsolete.
A new generation of frigates
In the plans of the Russian Admiralty, the most virtuous example of a new route should be Admiral Gorshkov. The frigate, launched in 2010 and the forerunner of a new class (Project 22350), was actually fitted with 3M22 Zircon hypersonic missiles, a family of effectors that has been a concern of European and American naval commands for some time. While there is debate as to how much of a technological revolution hypersonic missiles represent, there is no doubt that the passage of a ship equipped with these systems so close to the Italian, Spanish and Greek coasts is an element of concern for NATO.
What is new about this technology is not so much the speed, which exceeds the sound barrier: these capacities are already achieved by ballistic missiles which nonetheless follow a fairly predictable parabolic trajectory. On paper, the Zircon has the ability to reach Mach 9 (ie eleven thousand kilometers per hour), despite being a “cruise missile”: this therefore makes it manoeuvrable, allowing it to remain in the Earth’s atmosphere and even on the surface of the earth to travel water, making it very difficult to intercept. In addition, the air pressure generated at the tip creates a moving plasma cloud that absorbs radio waves and makes them invisible to active radars. While official Russian sources claim the Zircon can fly up to a thousand kilometers, tests so far have only shown an effective range of more than 500 kilometers (about a third the range of an American tomahawk, or the distance between Rome and the Sicilian). Channel).
The Zircon’s lethality is particularly pronounced against critical targets, which underpins the Western Navy’s approach, compounded by the fact that there are currently no systems specifically designed to intercept and shoot down this type of effector. The hypersonic missile was designed to eliminate high-value assets such as aircraft carriers and critical ground-based command and control infrastructure. Gorshkov’s invasion of the Mediterranean completes the range of missions the VMF is carrying out on the southern European flank: performing a function of strategic deterrence against the threat of Allied targets in Europe, which may seize the opportunity to take covert action against critical infrastructure such as pipelines and internet cables , and finally the ability to attack the fleets in waters far from Russian territory, thereby also keeping their land-attack missile capabilities at a distance.
However, Gorshkov is also a symbol of the limits of Russian naval power. So far, there are only three ships that come from Project 22350, one of which is currently in testing. The roadmap for the other five frigates has already slowed. Ironically, the main supplier of ship turbines first to the USSR, and then to Russia, has always been Ukraine, which since 2014 is clearly no longer a trading partner of the Russian military industry.
The Moskva River disaster in the summer of 2022 was exemplary: the Soviet-designed ship had not been modernized as originally anticipated and remained extremely vulnerable to new tactics such as the use of drones and the proliferation of anti-ship missiles. To compensate for the inability to launch an adequate number of new ships, Moscow has adopted a strategy aimed at modernizing its navy and loading existing hulls with new precision missile systems such as the Kalibr and the Zircon. This serves to increase the ships’ operational range and would turn even modest corvettes into an important operational asset, as they are able to project forces over longer and safer distances. Whether this will be enough to compensate for the obsolescence of the hulls, which often do not allow flexible adaptation to new missions, remains to be seen.
But at least as far as the Mediterranean is concerned, it is quite obvious that in the event of a conflict between Russia and NATO, the Russian ships in the region (besides the passing Gorshkov, currently her sister ship Admiral Kasatanov, the frigate Admiral Grigorovich, three corvettes and a U – Kilo-class boat) would be highly vulnerable. The Mediterranean basin is very busy and is patrolled by the Atlantic Alliance’s multinational forces. NATO’s Operation Sea Guardian and the Italian Navy’s Safe Mediterranean ensure an overwhelming numerical superiority in terms of deployed ships, and US and European forces dominate the airspace in the region. The real unknown remains the submarine factor, which despite everything still represents the real strength of the Russian naval forces today. Although the West’s anti-submarine capabilities have greatly improved, thanks in no small part to the introduction of the Franco-Italian Fremm frigates in anti-submarine configuration, the underwater environment remains the only one in which the Russians attack NATO defenses in the Mediterranean could.