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Juan Nepomuceno Eslava, completed 25 May 1994, was the first of two 131-ton Patrol boats delivered to Colombia’s Coast Guard by Bender Shipbuilding and Repair Company, Mobile, Alabama. The ether, Jose Maria Garcia de Toledo, was completed on 15 June. The 116-foot boats are armed with a 25-mm 79-caliber “Ushmaster chain gun forward (in the same Mk 88 mounting used by the U.S. Navy and U.S. Coast Guard) and two ^-caliber machine guns atop the superstructure. Well-equipped for law enforcement and drug interdiction duties, the Pair have relatively large crews for their Slze: 5 officers and 20 enlisted personnel. The broad diagonal stripe on the hull S|de is red, the narrow one yellow.
A first-time visitor to Germany’s annual Riel Week celebration in early June was °ne of the Lithuanian Navy’s two Grisha- fll-class corvettes, the Aukstaitis. Transferred on 6 November 1992, the pair are the only Project 1124-series “small antisubmarine ships” yet to be exported by Russia, although a unit of the latest version, the Grisha-V, was completed by Ukraine at Kiev and commissioned on 27 November 1993 as the Lutsk. Altogether, counting the Lutsk, some 96 units in the scries have been built since the first was launched in October 1968, at three different yards, and in at least five different major variants. Several already have been retired, however, and one, the Maritime Rorder Guard’s Grisha-II Saphir, is said to have foundered in a storm in 1987.
Lithuania’s navy and coast guard—like those of the other newly independent Baltic Republics, Estonia and Latvia—are a diverse mixture of donated Russian, German, and Scandinavian ships and
craft. Lithuania turned down a Russian offer of two Turya (Project 206M) torpedo boats in 1992, fearing too rapid a growth of its nascent fleet, which in 1994 still had only about 300 personnel.
Another first-time visitor to Kiel Week was the first Russian Navy Project 1154.0 frigate, the Neustrashimyy, although other Russian Navy units have participated in recent years. The Neustrashimyy also played a part in this year’s NATO Baltic Exercise. Laid down in 1986 and commissioned in January 1993, the 4,500-ton frigate remains attached to the Baltic Fleet and was said by visitors on board to be in only marginal material condition. Work is reportedly continuing on fitting out a second unit, the Nepristupnyy, at Yantar Shipyard, Kaliningrad. A third, originally to have been named Tuman, may have been renamed as the large warship announced recently to be launched on 20 October 1996 to commemorate the founding of the Russian Navy by Peter the Great, 300 Let Rossiyskomy Flot (“300 Years of the Russian Navy”).