How is the VMF doing today?
Well, their flagship, the Admiral Kuznetsov (which is, AIUI, also their only aircraft carrier) has been badly damaged twice in the past two years, while undergong a refit, and may not be back to service for another two to three years.
Everything I’ve read is morale is low and maintenance has not been great.
It looks like Russia prioritizes Army & Air Force, which actually makes sense for Russia. Their surface Navy has no chance in a sea battle and little major use otherwise.
How are the submarines doing?
The little I’ve seen on it indicates the Russian subs have been modernized. They’ve got a mix of Nuke & Diesel-Electrics fast attack subs. About 40 I think. About 20 missile subs. I’ve never read anything recent about submariner morale so no clue there.
I wonder if anyone on the board has a subscription to Janes, still probably the best resource.
Here’s an article that deals with their new hypersonic cruise missile launched from a Russian frigate. The article has links to other ships/missile/navy developments.
This site, The Drive and the sub-section dealing with the war zone is up to date on most current news regarding new developments around the world. Good source, comments are uneven; some excellent, some drivel.
They have a habit of lying about weapons systems - all fur coat and no knickers.
So the question is, reliability and effectiveness - hard to imagine they have come up with something no-one else has done. I would have expected the US would already have such systems or be well on the way.
What we have is their story of an experimental system - probably in highly rigged conditions and we don’t know how many failures they already had.
It is funny thing about reporting. The US mostly reports failures. Russia, China & N. Korea mostly report unverified successes. It is almost like the US is trying to hide its capabilities while the other 3 are trying to puff out their feathers to look bigger than they are.
Then you have the UK & France that just seem to do honest reporting.
Depends who they’re fighting. I know it’s not strictly the navy, but the Russian coast guard was able to handily overwhelm numerous ships of the Ukrainian navy in the Kerch Strait incident of 2014.