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.

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