Sergey Karginov, a deputy from the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR), made a somewhat unusual proposal last week. The politician, currently first vice chairman of the State Duma Committee for the Far East and the Arctic, said the country should buy back an aircraft carrier that currently belongs to China, the Type 001 Liaoning.
Karginov says that Moscow should buy the ship, which was once his, and even rename it "Vladimir Zhirinovsky", founder of the party, who died in April last year.
The current Liaoning, of the China People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN), was born in the Soviet Union as a Riga, a Kuznetsov-class aircraft carrier. The ship was laid down in December 1985 and was later renamed the Varyag.
Construction of the ship was never completed in the country, as the USSR collapsed in 1991. The hull was then shipped to Ukraine as scrap metal, presumably in exchange for a few bottles of vodka, says Karginov. In 1998, the ship was sold for US$ 20 million by a Chinese company, which would transform it into a huge floating hotel-casino.
This indeed happened to two other Russian aircraft carriers, the Minsk and Kiev, but this was not the case for the Varyag. As soon as she arrived in China in March 2002, the ship began extensive refitting to become China's first aircraft carrier, commissioned more than 10 years later as the Type 001 Liaoning.
This, in fact, is not the first time that the LDPR has tried to honor its founder. Last November, deputy Yaroslav Nilov ed the state-owned airline Aeroflot, asking it to name one of its planes after Zhirinovsky.
Currently, the Russian Navy has only one aircraft carrier, the iral Kuznetsov, sister ship of the former Varyag and now Liaoning. The aircraft carrier, however, was docked for repairs in 2017 and has since faced problems and accidents, including a recent fire.
