Some 1,000 ships have been decommissioned in the past 10 years because the Navy couldn't afford maintenance, according to Navy commanders. One Russian navy commander, Rear Adm. Nikolai Konorev, even said in a recent newspaper interview that if the funding shortages continue at the current level, the navy could go out of existence by 2015. Around the Northern Fleet headquarters in the Arctic port of Murmansk, the coastline has turned into a giant marine junkyard, with hundreds of ruptured and rusting ship hulls littering the shore. The military bars visitors from the naval facilities and ship junkyards, but the mounds of rusting metal can be seen from boats that cross Kola Bay. Sand and silt has partly buried some of the ships over the years.
Local residents rummage among the wreckage, ripping off pieces of metal that can be sold for scrap.
Even the ships that are officially still in service often cannot leave port. Navy officials say that 70 percent of their vessels need major repairs. Amid the lack of government funding, the navy's emergency rescue service has been working under commercial contracts with private firms to earn money for repairing its ships, toiling at oil terminals of Russia's Lukoil giant, said the chief of the Northern Fleet staff, Vice-Adm. As the Navy has little money to pay its officers, some turn to selling off equipment, further aggravating the fleet's condition. Last year, a nuclear submarine in Russia's Northern Fleet was disabled after thieves pilfered vital equipment.