The giant Russian nuclear icebreaker Ural suddenly appeared near the German coast in the Baltic Sea on Sunday. It passed the island of Fehmarn, which belongs to the federal state of Schleswig-Holstein, under the watchful eye of two German police ships and headed further east towards St Petersburg.
The awe-inspiring, 173-metre-long Ural has two nuclear reactors with a total capacity of 350 megawatts. It is the largest and most powerful vessel of its kind in the world. Three-metre-thick ice is said to be no problem for it.
The presence of the Ural off the coast of Germany has attracted all the more attention because it came at a time of Russian aggression against Ukraine.
According to the Kieler Nachrichten newspaper, the icebreaker set off from the Kara Sea at the edge of the Arctic Ocean, circumnavigated Scandinavia and headed for the shipyards in Kronstadt, a fortified island city west of St Petersburg. The reason is to repair the hull, for which Russia does not have the necessary facilities in Siberia for such large vessels.
The Ural’s pilgrimage in the strait between Germany and Denmark was monitored and escorted for ten hours by the German police ships Bad Bramstedt and Eschwege. Both are said to have switched off their identification system so that they could not be recognised. However, the German police would not comment on this. The Russian icebreaker sailed through without incident.
Russia has the largest fleet of icebreakers in the world. It is very important to Moscow in its efforts to underline its claims in the Arctic. The fleet ensures that Russian civilian as well as military ships can navigate in the frozen areas.
