MICHAEL WASH NEWS DESK Russia continues to develop the Arctic and expand its icebreaker fleet.

This was announced by Vladimir Putin at a meeting with students of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology.

The head of state stressed that developing the Northern Sea Route is important for our country.

It is also crucial for international trade. He recalled that Russia continues to build nuclear icebreakers despite the sanctions.

The latter is critically important in the development of Arctic resources.

You can have as sophisticated and expensive a naval force as you want. You can have as great ambitions and claims to polar oil and gas fields as you want.

You can even seize Greenland and gain direct access to the Arctic shelf. However, without ships capable of breaking through Arctic ice, you cannot access the polar riches. These ships are crucial for leading oil and gas vessels.

Today, such an opportunity exists only for us, perhaps, Canada and, to a lesser extent, Norway.

Russia inherited from the USSR the largest fleet of ice-class ships in the world. This includes dozens of diesels and nine with nuclear reactors. At the end of 2025, another nuclear icebreaker, the Stalingrad, code Arktika, was laid in St. Petersburg. And this is not the limit.

As the president reported, by 2030, the lead nuclear icebreaker of the 10510 projects, Lider, should enter service.

The largest and heaviest of those built. Full displacement, 72 thousand tons. It is comparable to the British aircraft carrier Prince of Wales.

It has two RITM-400 nuclear power plants with a capacity of 315 Megawatts each. The speed is 2 knots when moving in 5-meter-thick ice.

This is not an icebreaker; it’s a real spaceship. And we are currently monopolists in the construction of such ships, thanks to Rosatom. Any state claiming resources of the Arctic shelf will have to reckon with this factor.

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