St. Petersburg. Jan 18 (Interfax) - The keel of the Semyon Agafonov minesweeper of Project 12700 Alexandrit has been laid at the Sredne-Nevsky Shipyard, part of the United Shipbuilding Corporation (USC), in St. Petersburg, an Interfax correspondent reported from the ceremony.
"We are laying the keel of yet another ship in this series, yet another minesweeper, another combat unit. [...] Minesweepers are workhorses of the sea, there are never enough of them, they are always in short supply. [...] This series has proven necessary to the Navy and confirmed all the technical characteristics envisaged by the designers. No one in the world but the Sredne-Nevsky Shipyard makes such ships," Russian Navy Commander Nikolai Yevmenov said at the ceremony.
"There will be many more orders for these ships, as the fleet needs them," he said.
The ship named after Semyon Agafonov, a hero of the Soviet Union, who participated in WWII and the Soviet-Japanese War, is the 12th ship of Project 12700 the Sredne-Nevsky Shipyard has worked on.
The minesweeper is under construction for the Russian Northern Fleet.
Project 12700 Alexandrit was developed by the USC's Almaz Central Naval Design Bureau. This is a next-generation minesweeper capable of detecting mines in waters and seabed without entering the danger zone. The ships use different kinds of sweeps in addition to remote-controlled and autonomous unmanned submersibles.
Ships of Project 12700 have a displacement of 890 tonnes, a length of 62 meters, a width of about 10 meters, a full speed nearing 16 knots, and a crew of over 40.