A major fire, which may still be ongoing, has broken out on the former Soviet Kiev class aircraft carrier Minsk, which has been rotting away in a man-made lagoon just off a stretch of the Yangtze River in China for years now. The War Zone previously dove into the saga of how the flattop came to be anchored there in a feature you can find here.
The cause of the fire and Minsk‘s current status are unknown. Local authorities say the blaze broke out at around 4:00 PM local time, that there have been no apparent casualties, and that the incident is under investigation, according to Chinese media.
Pictures and video footage have emerged online that show a significant fire.
Fires onboard even well-maintained ships can easily become disastrous, especially if they are undergoing maintenance and only a skeleton crew is on board keeping watch. A prime example of this is the blaze that raged for days aboard the U.S. Navy’s Wasp class amphibious assault ship USS Bonhomme Richard in 2020, which ultimately rendered the vessel a total loss. What is left of Minsk has not, by any indication, been kept in good shape, which could have create increased risks.
Minsk was commissioned into the Soviet Navy in 1978. The Kiev class as a whole was something of an oddity among warships, with 40,000-ton-displacement vessels looking more like a hybrid of an aircraft carrier and a battlecruiser than a traditional flattop, as you can read more about here.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, the Russian Navy inherited the ships, but quickly found them difficult and expensive to sustain. In 1993, the Minsk‘s sister ship Novorossiysk notably suffered a major engine room fire.
Three of the four Kiev class carriers were ultimately sold off, with Minsk and Novorossiysk initially heading to a shipbreaker in South Korea. Admiral Gorshkov (originally named Baku) was sold to India in 2004 and became the subject of its own saga before finally entering service in that country in 2013 as the INS Vikramaditya.
Novorossiysk was ultimately scrapped in South Korea, but local protests led to Minsk being sold off to a Chinese company to be broken down. A group of Chinese entrepreneurs subsequently saved the ex-Minsk from the torch. The ship, with a mixture of retired Soviet-design and Chinese combat aircraft on its deck, became the centerpiece of a theme park called Minsk World that opened in 2000. Minsk World went bankrupt in 2006 and the Chinese government eventually reclaimed the land it stood on.
In the late 2010s, Minsk, already in increasingly poor condition, was relocated to where it sits currently, some 50 miles northwest of the Chinese city of Shanghai. Plans to establish a new Minsk World never came to fruition and the steadily more dilapidated ship became a destination for so-called ‘urban explorers’ to sneak aboard, as can be seen in the video below.
There are reports that authorities in the nearby city of Nantong had announced plans in January to rehabilitate the ship and turn it into a “national defense science education center.”
It’s interesting to note that former Kiev is also in China, where it became a separate tourist attraction at the Binhai Aircraft Park in Tianjin, China, some 100 miles southeast of Beijing. In 2011, the company that owns Binhai announced plans to turn the carrier, which has been much better maintained than Minsk, into a floating luxury hotel.
The extent of the damage that former Minsk may now have suffered remains to be seen. It is unfortunately possible that the ship’s already very sad story is now finally coming to an inglorious end.
UPDATE:
The fire looks to have subsided, but the island superstructure is destroyed:
Contact the author: joe@twz.com