February 18, 2006: The Russian navy is designing and building a new class of coastal defense corvettes. Forty of the new ships will be ordered, with ten assigned to each of the main fleets (Atlantic, Pacific, Baltic and Black Sea). The ships will displace 3,000 tons and the first of them will be ready for service within a year. The main job of the new ships will be searching for and destroying submarines. They will be able to stay at sea about ten days at a time. This is the first major buy of surface ships for the Russian navy since the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991.