Back to Battleships!
By Over at War is Boring, I expand, rewrite, and update a very old Sunday Battleship Blogging post:
Until the invasion of Crimea, Russia expected to take into service in 2016 RFS Sevastopol, a 21,000-ton-displacement, French-built amphibious assault ship. The choice of name was odd, given that—until recently—the city of Sevastopol lay outside the borders of Russia.
France may cancel the deal in light of Moscow’s aggression. But the soon-perhaps-not-to-be Sevastopol was not the first ship named for the great Russian naval base on the Crimean peninsula.
In fact, Russian naval history is an intricate web of politics, geography and foreign influence. Moscow has long struggled with the problems of maintaining four distinct, unsupportable fleets—and of an unreliable shipbuilding industry.
Read the rest, etc. I have very notional plans of someday revisiting, rewriting, and compiling the battleship posts for an e-book, but that’s probably a couple projects away.