Russian President Dmitri Medvedev announced recently, while on board the carrier Admiral Kuznetsov, that they will begin an aggressive campaign for the production of aircraft carriers in the next two years. In 2007, Admiral of the Fleet Vladimir Masorin, announced that within 20 to 30 years, Russia would have two carrier strike groups consisting of three carriers each. Russian style carriers are smaller than US carriers and have more defensive capability, reportedly giving them more maneuverability.
But to construct and service a major fleet, Russia needs a major port facility like Sevastopol, in the Ukraine, with its craggy coastline. Unfortunately for Russia (or more ominously, for the Ukrainians), a lease agreement with the Ukraine will expire in 2017. Reports suggest that the Ukraine is not interested in renewing this lease.
On the technical side, building a metal warship brings many kinds of problems that makers of fiberglass yachts and canoes don’t have to contend with. Testing for magnetic silencing and degaussing is one of them.
Lamentations on Chemistry 
ACCs are good for projecting power, but in the real world they can be easily taken out by a single missile. I somehow doubt any air-craft carrier can survive the onslaught of even a half dozen relatively inexpensive fighters firing a few dozen missiles. I regard their construction as a way to put people to work, but they’d no doubt all be destroyed quite quickly in any serious confrontation between equals. The google map shows how obsolete such large surface objects are.
You’re better off with submarines (Not sure if you can launch planes from a sub though). Still, you can’t be easily taken out by a guy on a jet ski.
Hi Mike, I think you are right if your hot-war opponent has submarines. But with lesser scenarios which are historically more frequent, nothing says “I’ll kick your ass at my convenience” quite like a carrier group sitting over the horizon.
Isn’t that scenario what a battle group is for? I thought carriers were always allied with a variety of cruisers and subs – if your planes can get close enough to fire off those missiles, I’m SOL, but you’ve already had to go through a metric f-ton of missiles and other projectiles to get there. Before you can fire the missiles, long-range radar should be able to detect you, and then you’re going to need a lot of planes to keep your missileers alive to kill the carrier. Cruise missiles might work (that’s what I thought Sunburn was designed to do) but that’s a known threat.
I assume Russia will actually have the money to bankroll its fleet? It hasn’t been all that long that they’ve actually been paying soldiers, right, and Chechyna wasn’t exactly a recruiting film. Hating the US won’t sustain their soldiers if they’re hungry, unpaid, and abused.