Russia is about to add a machine to its fleet that promises to redefine underwater naval power. This is the Perm, a nuclear submarine that will enter service before the end of 2026, as confirmed by Admiral Alexander Moiseyev, commander in chief of the Russian Navy. And we are not talking about just another submarine, but rather the first in history designed and built from scratch to fire hypersonic cruise missiles.

At 130 meters long, 13 meters wide and with a submerged displacement of 13,800 tons, the Perm is literally longer than a football field. It was launched in March 2025 at the Sevmash shipyard, designed by the Malakhit office, and is part of the Yasen-M class, the 885M project on which Moscow is building the core of its future fleet of multipurpose nuclear submarines. It is the sixth submarine in the entire Yasen/Yasen-M family, but the first to arrive equipped as standard with the necessary technology to carry and launch the feared 3M22 Zircon missile.

Why Zircon makes it unique

Here is the real technological leap. No other submarine in the Russian fleet has the ability to fire hypersonic missiles from the depths, and that makes the Perm an unprecedented piece of the Kremlin's arsenal. The 3M22 Zircon is a scramjet-powered anti-ship cruise missile capable of reaching speeds between Mach 8 and Mach 9, that is, between 9,800 and 11,000 kilometers per hour. Its operational range is between 500 and 1,000 kilometers, and it can carry both a conventional warhead and a nuclear charge, which gives it brutal versatility in combat.

Already in 2021 a Yasen-class submarine (the Severodvinsk) had fired a couple of these missiles during tests, but the Perm will be the first to have them integrated as a standard weapon since the original design. The submarine has eight vertical launch systems, each capable of hosting up to four Zircon missiles, or alternatively Onyx or Kalibr missiles, depending on the mission that needs to be covered. That flexibility to combine weapons is exactly what worries Western military analysts.

A weapon designed for stealth and deterrence

Beyond the speed of its missiles, what makes the Perm special is its combination of extreme stealth and long-range strike capabilities. Yasen-M submarines are designed to operate silently, evade Western anti-submarine defenses and execute missions against both ships and land targets, in addition to pursuing other submarines. This versatility makes it a platform that is not limited to a single type of mission, but can be adapted according to the scenario of the moment.

The Perm's own design had to be modified slightly compared to its predecessors to accommodate the Zircon system, something that was documented in the papers prepared for Vladimir Putin's visit to Murmansk in 2025. And although the exact technical data remains classified, the known figures are already enough to understand that we are facing one of the most advanced underwater platforms ever built by Moscow.

The interesting thing is that Perm will not be the end point of this development. The Russian naval industry is already working on the ninth Yasen-M class submarine, confirming that strengthening this fleet is an absolute priority for the Kremlin. Meanwhile, Russia remains the only country in the world that has demonstrated the ability to launch hypersonic cruise missiles from a submarine, an achievement that no other country has replicated so far. With the arrival of Perm, this technological advantage becomes even more concrete, and the rest of the naval powers will have to start taking note.

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