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Ships of Russian Black Sea Fleet to remain on duty in Mediterranean

MOSCOW, November 28. /ITAR-TASS/. Duty service in the Russian Navy's permanent force in the Mediterranean will be one of the main tasks of the Black Sea Fleet for next year, a military council meeting in Sevastopol said.

The meeting chaired by Black Sea Fleet Commander Vice-Admiral Alexander Vitko summed up this year's results of the fleet activities and outlined objectives for 2014, fleet spokesman Nikolai Voskresensky told Itar-Tass on Thursday.

The Black Sea Fleet is planned to receive new ships and submarines for service and carry out tasks in the permanent naval group in the Mediterranean in 2014, the official said.

Next year, three submarines of Project 636 — the Novorossiisk, the Rostov-on-Don and the Stary Oskol — will join the fleet. Six submarines of the project will be delivered by 2017 to form a full brigade. For the present, the fleet has two submarines — the Alrosa of Project 877V and the Svyatoi Knyaz Georgy of Project 641B.

The new submarines will be based in Sevastopol and Novorossiisk.

The fleet in 2014 will receive the new guard ship Admiral Grigorovich, the first in the series of six guard ships with Kalibr missile systems.

Speaking about this year's results, Vitko said that ships of the Black Sea Fleet logged eight long-distance trips and 37 calls at foreign ports. The guard missile cruiser Moskva, logging more than 23,000 nautical miles, carried out tasks in the Atlantic and the Pacific and headed the permanent naval group in the Mediterranean.

The fleet also participated in exercises of the Black Sea naval cooperation group Blackseafor, West 2013, Ioniex 2013 and Fairway of Peace 2013.

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