At the Admiralty Shipyards in St. Petersburg, a vessel is taking shape that Russia has been waiting decades for. It’s called the Ivan Frolov, and when it is completed in 2028 it will be the largest scientific research vessel in the world — 165 metres long, 25,000 tons, 20 laboratories, two helicopters, room for 240 people. Its Arc7 ice class means it can push through the thickest Arctic pack ice. Its cost — 40 billion rubles (around €446 million) — was signed off by the Russian government in 2023. As of early 2026, over 100 hull sections are already assembled.
More striking: the ship is designed to stay in service until the 2070s. Scientists working its maiden voyage in 2029 will hand it to the next generation, who will hand it to the next.
The Ivan Frolov replaces two ageing Soviet-era ships — the Mikhail Somov and the Akademik Fedorov, built in Finland in 1987 — and it will be the only ship capable of reliably supplying all five of Russia’s year-round Antarctic stations. It does five jobs at once: tanker, icebreaker, passenger ship, cargo carrier, research vessel. It’s named after Ivan Frolov, an oceanologist who led Russia’s Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute (AARI) for two decades until his death in 2020.
AARI is the organisation behind all of this, and it has been around since 1920. Over a century of expeditions, it has built a presence on both poles: five year-round stations in Antarctica, research observatories in the Arctic, and a fleet that now includes the Severny Polyus — a vessel unlike anything else at sea.
That vessel is the Severny Polyus — “North Pole” — a self-propelled ice platform that locks itself into Arctic sea ice and drifts for up to two years at a time. Its shape has earned it a nickname: the bathtub. On board: 15 laboratories, a crew of 16, and a research team of up to 34 scientists — studying everything from the ocean floor to the stratosphere while the platform drifts wherever the currents take it.
The platform revives a tradition that dates to 1937, when Ivan Papanin led the first Soviet drift expedition. That program was suspended in 2013 — the ice had become too thin and unstable for traditional floe stations. The Severny Polyus solved that by making the station the ship itself. Its first expedition ran from October 2022 to May 2024, covering more than 3,000 nautical miles and completing research across 50 scientific areas. The second — North Pole-42 — is currently underway. By March 2025, the platform had reached 85° North, roughly 500 km from the geographic pole, where helicopters flew 1,000 km to complete a crew exchange — a first in Arctic history.
The data these missions collect — on climate change, ice dynamics, ocean currents — feeds directly into weather forecasting and navigation on the Northern Sea Route. The Arctic is changing faster than anywhere else on Earth, and every country with access to it is watching closely. Russia, with a century of institutional knowledge and two major programmes now underway, is watching more closely than most.
