Buyan-M

Russia's small, shallow-draft cruise-missile corvette — a roughly 950-tonne hull that can slip through inland rivers to redeploy between fleets and fire Kalibr land-attack missiles a thousand kilometres or more. It conducted the first combat use of the Kalibr against Syria in 2015 and has been one of the principal platforms for Russia's missile strikes on Ukraine.

Overview

The Buyan-M (Project 21631) is a class of twelve small missile ships — in NATO terms, guided-missile corvettes — built for the Russian Navy. Designed by the Zelenodolsk Design Bureau and constructed at the Zelenodolsk Shipyard in Tatarstan, they are the missile-armed evolution of the gun-armed Project 21630 Buyan. Their defining feature is an eight-cell vertical launcher firing the Kalibr family of cruise missiles, which gives a hull displacing under 1,000 tonnes a strategic land-attack reach normally reserved for far larger warships. Because they are small and shallow-draft, they can transit Russia's interconnected rivers and canals to move between the Caspian, Black Sea, Baltic and Northern fleets — a mobility that, combined with the Kalibr's range, has made them a persistent strike threat well beyond the coastlines they were nominally built to defend.

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