MURMANSK, August 18. /TASS/. The Northern Fleet’s marines held tactical drills on the Taimyr Peninsula for landing an amphibious assault force onto an unequipped shore to defend a vital industrial facility in the Arctic, the Fleet’s press office reported on Tuesday.
"Today tactical drills were held on the Taimyr Peninsula to practice combat operations in landing an amphibious assault force onto an unequipped shore of the Yenisei River near Dudinka. The drills involved the crews of ships, the personnel and hardware of the army corps, a Northern Fleet marine infantry brigade and also a helicopter group that make part of the Northern Fleet’s Arctic grouping," the press office said in a statement.
Under the drills’ scenario, the Northern Fleet’s taskforce was assigned the task of recapturing a bridgehead seized by notional terrorists and landing the amphibious assault force’s military hardware for further developing the offensive deep into the peninsula’s territory for defending a vital industrial facility in the Arctic.
The training battle started with an air strike on the notional terrorists’ positions. This was followed by the fire opened against sheltered coastal positions by the batteries of the large anti-submarine warfare ship Severomorsk and the large amphibious assault ships Kondopoga and Alexander Otrakovsky within the Arctic grouping that left Severomorsk in the Murmansk Region for its deployment on August 5, the press office said.
Ka-27 helicopters delivered marine infantry personnel to the coast to protect a group of field engineers who had reached the coast by fast-speed boats to make breaches in minefields and prepare the place for landing military hardware. As soon as the positions were ready, the ships sailed close to the coastline and started landing amphibious assault hardware.
Overall, 20 combat vehicles rolled out of the tween-decks: armored personnel carriers, snow and swamp-going vehicles and self-propelled artillery guns, the press office said, without specifying the size of the participating personnel.
According to the command’s preliminary assessments, the entire personnel involved in landing the amphibious assault force demonstrated high combat skills and practiced the tactic of joint operations in conducting a battle, seizing and holding a coastal bridgehead in a qualitative way, the press office said.