In December, the Border Guard Service of the FSB of Russia should receive several new ships and boats for the coast guard at once. And some of them - two new ships and six high-speed boats, in addition to the already delivered Mongoose and Sobols, will come to Crimea. This, in turn, will make it possible to almost completely form the coast guard ship group in the new Russian border administration.
Border patrol boat "Mongoose". Photo: Andrey Iglov / RIA Novosti www.ria.ru
The new Project 22460 Hunter patrol ships have special capabilities. Their role is primarily important for the protection of the border and territorial waters in the area of the continental shelf. The Hunter can safely perform tasks in the sea with young and broken ice up to 20 centimeters thick. Its equipment allows for rescue operations and environmental control. There are no analogues to this patrol ship, which is rightly called a new generation ship, in Russia so far. One of the main features of the "Okhotnik" is the presence on board of a landing area for a light helicopter. A shelter hangar can be equipped for a helicopter in a matter of minutes. It is noteworthy that the site and the shelter hangar were placed on a ship with a displacement of only about 670 tons. In addition, in the aft part of the ship there is an inclined slip, on which a speedboat of a rigid-inflatable type is installed, which can be used, for example, to quickly deliver an inspection party to an intruder.
The Coast Guard group was also supplemented by the Sobol high-speed boats with a speed of 47 knots and the Mongoose high-speed boats with a cruising speed of over 50 knots (about 100 km / h). In terms of their capabilities, these are actually interceptor boats. They are designed not only to protect the coastal zone and natural resources, but also to intercept high-speed targets. In terms of their seaworthiness and combat characteristics, they are not inferior to foreign ones and surpass the best domestic boats of this class and have already become a real threat for poachers.
But the most anticipated replenishment of the border fleet is the Polar Star, 1st rank border patrol ship, launched and undergoing testing this year, specially designed for use in the Arctic. This is the first ship of this level built in the last 20 years. It is the only one in the history of Soviet and Russian shipbuilding created specifically for border guards. The ship is equipped with a modern navigation and tactical complex, a helicopter-based complex and is able to overcome ice fields in the Arctic seas with an ice thickness of up to 1 meter.
At the same time, it is important that we are not just talking about replacing old technology, equipment and weapons with new models. This is just one of the directions of the new concept for the development of the coast guard. After all, sea areas are increasingly becoming areas of large-scale economic activity. Suffice it to mention our plans for the development of the Arctic and the development of the Far Eastern region. Accordingly, the protection of national economic interests at a new level dictates the need for a qualitative change in the entire activity of the coast guard. And it covers not only the sea border of the country with a length of 38 thousand kilometers, but also the river border - 7 thousand kilometers, and the lake border - 475 kilometers.
The coast guard management system itself is also becoming fundamentally new. As Vice Admiral Alexei Volsky, First Deputy Head of the Coast Guard Department of the FSB Border Service, told the RG correspondent, powerful automated control centers are being created. One of them, with its center in Murmansk, will take control of the border in the Arctic. Another, in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, is our water area of the Far East.
According to Volsky, special emphasis is placed on the development of a system for monitoring the surface situation. So, already now the automated control system almost completely covers the Russian water area of the Black Sea, including the Crimea. The work on the creation of the same system in the water area of the Gulf of Finland is nearing completion.
The meaning of this system is that all information from border ships at sea, coastal radio-technical observation posts and satellites online flows into a single command digital analytical center. This information is processed and immediately distributed automatically to ships, which can see the situation not only around them, but also, for example, in a completely different area. The commander of the border ship will immediately know the whole situation, which ships and where are located, which of them is legal. That is, a potential violator will not be conducted from the moment of violation, but long before that.
The first results of these innovations, by the way, can already be appreciated by many citizens of our country. More and more Russian fish and seafood products are on the shelves. That, in principle, should be the norm for a country washed by two oceans. But - it was not. Largely due to the fault of the poachers, who put their business on an industrial level.
“The main offenders in the illegal extraction of biological resources, as in previous years, are the so-called" underflags "- as a rule, ships with a Russian crew, but under the flag of a" convenient "country, - says Alexey Volsky. - In the first half of the year alone, 18 such violators were detained, on board of which they found almost 116 tons of crab caught without a license.
According to Volsky, in general, the measures taken by the border guards allowed not only to reduce illegal supplies and the number of poaching fleet, but also to create favorable conditions for legal crab hunting in the Pacific region. In the first six months of this year, it has grown by a quarter: from 25.5 thousand tons to almost 34 thousand. Moreover, a direct consequence of the decrease in poaching activity was a sharp reduction in the supply of crab to the ports of Japan. According to official information from Tokyo, the volume of illegal shipments of crab of Russian origin to Japanese ports decreased by 2, 6 times - from 9.6 thousand tons in the first half of 2013 to 3.6 thousand tons in the first six months of 2014. This, by the way, was reflected in the Japanese crab market, where the price of Kamchatka crab increased 3, 7 times and rose to 61, 5 dollars per kilogram. The poachers in the Far East were so pressed against that hundreds of tons of crab were brought to South Korea by planes from Norway and Canada. The situation is similar on the Kola Peninsula. The Russian Coast Guard managed to practically nullify the activities of "amateur fishermen" on high-speed small boats - the so-called "dogs". They were engaged in the illegal transfer of unrecorded fish from fishing trawlers to the shore. As soon as the border guards had interceptor boats "Sobol", which surpassed the speed of poachers, the "dog swimming" gradually came to naught.
Illegal commercial fishing in the Barents Sea has decreased to isolated cases. According to Volsky, the Norwegian coast guard admitted that thanks to joint efforts, illegal fishing and, in particular, cod is practically absent here. Moreover, for the first time in recent years, a significant increase in the cod herd has been recorded.
And in the northern part of the Caspian Sea, there is a tough fight against the sturgeon-caviar mafia. Last year, our border guards detained more than 190 small vessels here for violating the border regime and environmental legislation, and hundreds of thousands of meters of nets were eaten out. 12 legal entities and more than 690 individuals were brought to administrative responsibility. Total control at sea borders led to the fact that in just six months, 60 violating ships were detained, of which 28 were foreign. Five of them were confiscated. Fines were imposed for more than 358 million rubles.
