Putin asks Debeljak to build him an aircraft carrier

“Brodosplit” has received a plethora of inquiries from abroad regarding capacities in the military shipbuilding sector in recent business years.

However, no inquiry has been as spectacular or geopolitically significant as the letter that arrived from Moscow.

– Can you build an aircraft carrier for the Russian Navy?, was the inquiry that came from Russia.

With this correspondence, unusually brief considering the subject matter, which was received by the Sales Department of “Brodosplit”, some key ministers of the now former government of Zoran Milanović were also aware. These ministers were willing to offer government financial guarantees for such a Croatian-Russian arrangement. It was intended, it can be heard, that the project be presented personally to Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu. And Josip Jurišić, spokesperson for the management of “Brodosplit”, confirmed to Slobodna Dalmacija the existence of an interesting inquiry. However, as the story did not develop further from the inquiry, the shipyard did not want to comment further.

The basic draft would be created at the desk of the “Nevsky Design Bureau”, which is currently developing three types of new carriers. It is not excluded that another European shipyard has received an inquiry about the possibilities of building a Russian aircraft carrier, similar to the one that arrived in Split. The French built two helicopter carriers, “Vladivostok” and “Sevastopol”, but did not deliver them due to Russian aggression against Ukraine. As business is just business, Paris paid Moscow huge contractual penalties (over one billion euros) for the non-delivery of the ships.

In this story, one cannot avoid the question of “Brodosplit’s” capabilities to engage in such a project of the century. If we assume that it would be a carrier with a capacity of 55 fighter jets, weighing 65 thousand tons, up to 300 meters long, with a draft of nine meters, using a conventional gas turbine propulsion, estimates suggest that at least six thousand qualified workers and hundreds of designers, which “Brodosplit” does not have, would need to be engaged for its construction. Additionally, the construction of such a capital facility requires a dry dock, which does not exist anywhere in the entire Adriatic and eastern Mediterranean. Based on these coordinates, informal, more optional estimates were made in the Split shipyard regarding the engagement of labor for the construction of a ship that strategically changes the balance of power on global battlefields.