Russia Commissions the Yasen-M Submarine Arkhangelsk, Its Fifth of the Class

Russia has commissioned the Arkhangelsk, a nuclear-powered guided-missile submarine of the Yasen-M class, into its Northern Fleet. The handover ceremony took place at the Sevmash yard in Severodvinsk on 27 December 2024, with Navy Commander-in-Chief Admiral Alexander Moiseyev in attendance.

The Arkhangelsk (hull K-564) is the fifth Yasen-class boat overall and the fourth built to the improved Project 885M standard, following the lead ship Severodvinsk and the 885M units Kazan, Novosibirsk and Krasnoyarsk. Four further hulls — Perm, Ulyanovsk, Voronezh and Vladivostok — are at various stages of construction.

The Yasen-M is Russia's most capable attack-submarine design: quieter than its Soviet-era predecessors, and armed through vertical-launch tubes that can carry Kalibr and Oniks cruise missiles and, in principle, the hypersonic Zircon. It is the platform Western navies treat as the benchmark for the Russian undersea threat in the North Atlantic.

The constraint is tempo, not capability. Sevmash has delivered these boats at roughly one a year, and the programme has run well behind its original schedule; each commissioning is therefore a genuine increment to Russian undersea strike power rather than a routine event. For NATO, a growing Yasen-M force is the argument for sustaining anti-submarine warfare investment across the GIUK gap.

The question through the late 2020s is whether Sevmash can hold even its slow cadence while also servicing Russia's ballistic-missile submarine programme — and how many Yasen-M hulls the fleet ultimately fields against the wartime pressures on Russia's shipbuilding base. Commissioning details as reported by USNI News and Naval News.