The Sad Story Of How This Soviet Aircraft Carrier Ended Up Rotting In A Landlocked Chinese Lagoon

The former SovietKievclass aircraft carrierMinskis rusting away, seemingly abandoned, in the middle of a man-made lagoon some 50 miles northwest of the Chinese city of Shanghai. It's a visual that feels better suited to a movie or video game set in a cyberpunk dystopia or an Earth where nature has reclaimed areas in the aftermath of some kind of apocalypse. It looks to be a sad and lonely fate for the ship, which was already spared the scrapper's torch once by Chinese businessmen in the 1990s.

The ex-Minsk's present home sits just off the Yangtze River to one side of the Sutong Yangtze River Bridge in Nantong, China. Its immediate neighbors are farms and associated agricultural facilities. Looking at satellite imagery of the site, to the immediate north of the Lagoon, there is what looks to be a viewing platform with a walkway leading back to various structures and a tented pavilion. All of this looks to be part of equally abandoned work on a planned theme park that was to feature the aircraft carrier at its center, but which never opened.

How the ship, which had previously been the centerpiece of another amusement park in Shenzhen, just to the northeast of Hong Kong, some 750 miles away from its current location, got to where it is now, is something of a saga.

TheMinskwas first laid down in a Soviet shipyard, situated in what is now Ukraine, in 1972. It was the second ship in theKievclass and was commissioned into the Soviet Navy in 1978.

TheKievclass design is something of an oddity among modern aircraft carriers, to begin with, having a bow and island that both look more reminiscent of what you might expect to see on abattlecruiser, along with a relatively small, angled flight deck. The Soviets categorized these 40,000-ton-displacement vessels as a "heavy aviation cruiser," a term also applied to the more traditional lookingAdmiral Kuznetsovthat followed.

Befitting this description, theKievshad launchers for eight P-500 Bazalt anti-ship cruise missiles, also known to NATO as the SS-N-12 Sandbox, and two turrets with twin 76mm guns, among other weapons. This was all in addition to their air wings, which typically consisted of a dozen Yak-38 Forger jump jets and a slightly larger number of Kamov Ka-25/27/29 helicopters.Kuznetsovalso had a similar anti-ship missile capability, with launch cells built right into its flight deck, asyou can read about more here.

Minskwas assigned to the Soviet Navy's Pacific Fleet and had a largely uneventful service life in the twilight of the Cold War, as did her sister shipsKievandNovorossiysk. A fourthKievclass carrier,Baku, was commissioned in 1987. It featured a new phased array radar, improved electronic warfare capabilities, launchers for four more P-500s, and turreted 100mm guns in place of the twin 76mm weapons, among other additions, which often led to it being described as the sole example of a distinct subclass.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the new Russian Navy took possession of all four ships, but found them difficult and costly to operate and maintain.Minskwas had already been effectively put into mothballs sometime between 1989 and 1990 due to "severe engineering problems," according to the 1993 edition ofCombat Fleets of the World. In 1993,Novorossiyskalso suffered a major engine room fire.

With limited immediate options to rehabilitate those two ships – the shipyards where they were built and that had the facilities necessary to conduct major repairs on them were now in the independent country of Ukraine – and the equally poor state ofKiev, the decision was made to sell them off as scrap. By 1995,MinskandNovorossiyskhad made their way to South Korea to be broken. The fate ofKievwas more complicated and we will come back to that later on.

An attempt was made to getBaku, by then renamedAdmiral Gorshkov, back into service. However, in 2004, that ship wassold to Indiaand it subsequently an expensive and drawn-out conversion process that turned it into a more conventional short-take-off-but-arrested-recovery (STOBAR) carrier with a full flight deck and ski jump.

The formerNovorossiyskwas ultimately scrapped in South Korea in 1997, but protests by South Korean environmentalistsprompted the saleof the ex-Minskfirst to a Chinese shipbreaking company, Guangdong Ship Dismantling, and then to Si Ke Investment Company, Limited. Si Ke, established by Chinese entrepreneurs who had made their money primarily through video game arcades, bought the ship with the express purpose of building a theme park around it. They paid approximately $4.3 million at the time, close to $7.3 million in 2021 dollars, for what was left of theMinsk.

The aptly titled Minsk World opened in Shenzhen in 2000. A curious assortment of aircraft, including ChineseQ-5 Fantancombat jets, Soviet-madeMiG-23 and MiG-27 Floggerswing-wing jets, andMi-24 Hind helicopters, were put on display on its flight deck and down below in the hangar. The exact origins of the MiG-23s and MiG-27s, as well as the Mi-24s, are unclear, as the Chinese military never operated those types.Flyingand non-flying examplesof these types, and other Soviet military aircraft designs, certainly have been bought and sold on the open market, bycommercial enterprisesandprivate citizens, since the end of the Cold War.

Inert weapons, or mock-ups thereof, including missiles, bombs, and torpedoes, as well as other Soviet militaria were also displayed. Exhibits covering the Chinese military were also added. As seen in the video below, song-and-dance numbers were also regularly held at indoor and outdoor stages installed on the ship.

明斯克世界的原始所有者破产n 2006. The park and the carrier inside were subsequently auctioned off to a state-owned holding company, CITIC Group.

Before Minsk World opened, some experts and observers had suggested that the purchase of the carrier by a Chinese company was some kind of subterfuge to assist in the establishing of a carrier capability for the People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN).Kievhad also been sold to another Chinese firm with the stated aim of turning it into a tourist attraction. Around the same time, a more shadowy firm based in Macau, with ties to the PLAN, had boughtKuznetsov's unfinished sister shipVaryagfrom Ukraine, saying it planned to convert intoa floating hotel and casino.

As it turned out, despite assessments from experts that it wouldbe too onerousto returnVaryagto any sort of operational state, the PLAN did formally commission that ship in 2012as theLiaoning, and it remainsin service to this day. There's no indication one way or another that the acquisition of theMinsk, along with the actual opening of Minsk World, was in any way part of some larger plan on the part of the Chinese government to conceal its aircraft carrier ambitions. "Their target group is different," an anonymous advisor to the Minsk World project hadtoldThe Washington Postin 1999 when asked if there was a concern about competition from a future hotel and casino created from theVaryag.

If there was any real competition to Minsk World, it could have come from Binhai Aircraft Park in Tianjin, China, some 100 miles southeast of Beijing, which is whereKievwent. Q-5s are also on display on that ship, as aremock-ups of Yak-38s. In 2011, the company that owns that park announced plans to turn that former carrier into more ofa floating luxury hotelwith at least five presidential suites.

"Previously, China didn't have aircraft carriers. People find them mysterious and are curious about them. Even though China's first aircraft carrier [the Liaoning] has now gone on sea trials, it will be quite hard for the public to ever visit it," Liu Chang, a marketing manager at Binhai Aircraft Park toldThe Guardiannewspaper at the time. "I guess people can come here to fulfil their curiosity."

Binhai Aircraft Park remains open and pictures show the ex-Kievto be, at least on the surface, well maintained. The same cannot be said of the formerMinsk, which, along with the aircraft on display, looked to be in an increasingly dilapidated state even before Minsk World shut down for good in 2016. The park was closed after government officials decided to reclaim the land it sat on for other purposes.

The ship, which had been repainted sometime in the intervening years with the hull number "16," the same as that onLiaoning, was subsequently moved to where it sits now near Shanghai, arriving there between 2017 and 2018. There had been plans to establish a new Minsk World, but that has not come to pass, though it's not entirely clear why. It is worth noting that there has been a巨大的航母复制品, reportedly meant to be anear-full-scale mock-upof the American supercarrierUSSNimitz, that people can tour at the Military Education Center near Dianshan Lake, close to Shanghai, since 2002.

Whatever the ostensible plans for the remains of Minsk might be now, it is clearly all-but-abandoned. There is one video of the ship on YouTube, that an individual shot in 2019 using a camera on a quadcopter drone. There are no signs of activity on or around the ship whatsoever.

In 2020, the Burbex YouTube channel, short for Brin's Urban Exploration, which posts videos of individuals poking around various abandoned facilities, uploaded footage shot from within the ship. Remains of the exhibits, including one of the MiG-23s, are still inside, but are in very poor shape. The general condition of things strongly suggests these were not the first people to sneak aboard the aircraft carrier since it was first anchored in the enclosed lagoon. All told, there doesn't seem to be any real security in place at the site, at all.

All told, the future of what is left of theMinsklooks bleak. It remains to be seen how much longer the present owners will let the ship languish in its man-made lagoon before making some final decision about its fate. The longer it sits there, exposed to the elements with no real care given to its condition, the more likely it is that its next destination will be a scrapyard.

Thanks toDecker Evelethfor bringing the sorry state of theMinskto our attention.

Contact the author: joe@thedrive.com