Putin attends naval parade and promises new ships

President Vladimir Putin said the Russian navy will get 40 new ships and vessels this year, as he attended a Navy Day parade in St Petersburg.

The event in St Petersburg and the nearby town of Kronshtadt, featuring 46 ships and vessels and more than 4,000 troops, aimed to “demonstrate the growing power of our navy”, Mr Putin said.

He said 40 ships and vessels of different classes will enter service this year, and that the Russian navy will be equipped with hypersonic weapons to boost its combat capabilities.

Opening the parade, he said that “six more vessels for the far-sea zone were laid down at Russia’s three leading shipyards” in the past few days.

The Kremlin has made military modernisation its top priority amid tensions with the West that followed Moscow’s 2014 annexation of Crimea.

Similar parades marking Russia’s Navy Day on Sunday took place in the Far Eastern cities of Vladivostok and Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsk, Sevastopol in the annexed Crimea, the seaport towns of Severomorsk and Baltiysk, Kaspirsk in the south of Russia and the port city of Tartus in Syria.

Earlier this week Putin attended a ceremony of keel-laying of new warships in Crimea and pledged to continue an ambitious program of building new warships, saying that Russia needs a strong navy to defend its interests and “help maintain a strategic balance and global stability.”