Free Republic

Russia’s state nuclear agency has launched a new icebreaker, Ural, as part of the country’s plans to dominate the newly warming Arctic region. The nuclear-powered ship is one of three new icebreakers commissioned by Moscow to navigate waters choked with sea ice and smash its way through if necessary. The ship, Ural, is the third in the class of three Project 22220 icebreakers. The ship was constructed by the Baltic Shipyards of St. Petersburg and will be handed over to Rosatom, Russia’s nuclear agency, in 2021. The Project 22220 ships are 173 meters (567 feet) long and 34 meters (111...

In June 1981, the Soviet Union began building a huge, nuclear-powered reconnaissance ship specifically designed to sail thousands of miles to the U.S. missile test site at the remote Kwajalein Atoll in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. There, the vessel would sit for months, hoovering up electronic data in order to determine what America’s most secretive weapons could do. But the spy ship Ural, completed in May 1983, sailed only once—from the Baltic shipyard where she was built to her home port of Vladivostok—and never went anywhere near Kwajalein. Hobbled by faulty hardware, cursed with bad luck and starved...

Perhaps you've seen him — or them. Victor Wanchena explains why he rides his salt-encrusted Ural on an arctic January day.

MOSCOW, FEBRUARY 25 (RIA Novosti) - A portable antiaircraft missile system has been seized from a local criminal group in Yekaterinburg in the Urals region in the east of European Russia, the Russian Interior Ministry said on Wednesday. According to acting minister Rashid Nurgaliev, this happened in January, when a "large network of organized crime" was exposed in the city. A disassembled Igla system was found in a hideout in a private house. Before that, the police used to find this kind of weapons only with militants in Chechnya, Nurgaliev said. The hideout was found to contain an entire arsenal...