ST. PETERSBURG, October 30. /TASS/. Two new diesel-electric powered submarines of the Varshavyanka family have been laid down at the Admiralty Shipyards in St Petersburg. They were designed by the Rubin design bureau of maritime technologies and they round out a series of six new submarines for the Black Sea Fleet.

On the whole, more than 40 new ships — strike submarines, missile carrying frigates, corvettes based on stealth technologies, amphibious ships, and auxiliary seacraft — will be entered on the Navy’s tables of equipment before the yearend and the bulk of them has been built at shipyards of Russia’s Northwest.

The newest nuclear submarines are built by Sevmash plant in the Arkhangelsk region. By 2020, it is expected to build eight strike missile-carrying submarines of the Borei family, each of them capable of carrying sixteen Bulava intercontinental ballistic missiles, which can deliver 96 nuclear charges at a distance of up to 9,000 km.

Sevmash is also building eight fourth-generation Yasen submarines — the multirole killers of aircraft carriers equipped with supersonic cruise missiles and universal deepwater torpedos.

In 2018, the plant is expected to hand to the Navy a submarine carrier of manned and unmanned deepwater descent capsules. It is currently building a specialized submarine for hydroacoustic surveillance.

In the meantime, the Admiralty Shipyards, the oldest shipbuilding enterprise in Russia is building fourth-generation diesel-electric powered submarines of the Lada family. The Ladas have advanced noiseless electric engines and they labeled ‘the black holes’ for their furtiveness and deadliness.

The Varshavyankas, which are the predecessors of the Ladas

The surface fleet remains a crucial component of the Navy. The Severnaya Verf shipyard in St. Petersburg is building up-to-date frigates equipped with sea-based cruise missiles, anti-ship and anti-submarine guided missiles, as well as Redut and Kortik air defense complexes.

Also laid down in staples there are the stealth corvettes equipped with Uran missile complexes.

The frigates that can operate in the Black Sea and in the Mediterranean are build and equipped with missile and air defence complexes at the Yantar shipyard in Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea.

The flagship of the family, Admiral Grigorovich, will be handed to the Navy before the end of this year.

In addition to it, Yantar is preparing for commissioning the big amphibious ship Ivan Gren - a helicopter carrier armed with artillery rocket systems and capable of providing landfall of 300 marines, forty armored personnel carriers and thirteen tanks.