Ulyanovsk

The Ulyanovsk database country assignment appears to be incorrect: Ulyanovsk was a Soviet Project 1143.7 nuclear-powered aircraft carrier laid down at the Black Sea Shipyard in Nikolayev in 1988. It was intended to give the Soviet Navy a true large-deck carrier with catapult capability, going beyond the ski-jump limitations of the Kuznetsov design. The project was cancelled after the collapse of the Soviet Union, with the hull reportedly around mid-construction before scrapping began in 1992. The page should therefore present the equipment as a Soviet/Russian naval program while flagging the current country metadata as a likely cleanup item.

Project 1143.7 was conceived as a much more capable aircraft carrier than the preceding Soviet aviation cruisers. Open sources describe a nuclear-powered ship of roughly supercarrier scale, intended to operate fixed-wing fighters and support aircraft from a full-length flight deck with both ski-jump and catapult features. The design also retained Soviet preferences for shipborne missile armament and heavy self-defense systems. Its planned air wing and power plant would have made it the Soviet Navy's most ambitious carrier design, but no completed ship ever entered service.

Had Ulyanovsk entered service, it would have supported Soviet blue-water naval aviation, fleet air defense, strike operations, and protection of surface and submarine forces. Its cancellation left Russia without a completed nuclear-powered carrier and limited post-Soviet carrier aviation to the troubled Admiral Kuznetsov. Operationally, Ulyanovsk is best understood as a counterfactual capability marker: it shows what the late Soviet Navy wanted to build, and the industrial and fiscal limits that stopped that ambition from becoming a deployable carrier force.