Karakurt-class

Russia's small, stealthy "missiles-with-a-hull" — the Project 22800 Karakurt is an 860-ton corvette built around eight vertical cells of Kalibr land-attack or P-800 Oniks anti-ship cruise missiles. It is the more seaworthy, blue-water sibling of the river-and-coastal Buyan-M: the same idea of packing strategic strike firepower onto a cheap, minimal hull, but able to operate in open seas. Heavily armed for its size and produced across several yards, it has also been a recurring Ukrainian target.

Overview

The Karakurt-class (Project 22800; "karakurt" is a venomous black widow spider) is a Russian stealth guided-missile corvette designed to deliver outsized strike firepower from a small, inexpensive platform. Like the Buyan-M it carries the UKSK universal vertical launcher — eight cells loaded with Kalibr cruise missiles for land attack or supersonic P-800 Oniks for anti-ship work — but on a hull optimized for the open sea rather than the Caspian's shallows and rivers. The concept is quintessentially modern Russian: rather than build scarce, expensive large surface combatants, distribute the same cruise-missile firepower across many small, hard-to-build-but-cheap-to-arm corvettes, complicating an adversary's targeting while keeping the Kalibr threat afloat.

Development

Project 22800 derives from the 1990s Almaz Project 12300 Skorpion missile-boat concept and was, per Wikipedia, heavily influenced by the Project 21631 Buyan-M. The lead ship was laid down in 2015 and commissioned in 2018, with around 18 planned, originally intended to be split among the Pacific, Baltic and Black Sea Fleets, per Naval Technology and TASS. Construction is spread across the Pella, Amur and Zaliv (Kerch) shipyards — a distributed program that has suffered delays, including contractual disputes and litigation between the Defence Ministry and Pella. Early hulls were named for natural phenomena (Hurricane, Typhoon, Storm) before being renamed after Russian cities. The class is a deliberate evolution of the Buyan-M toward genuine open-ocean capability.

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