The United Shipbuilding Corporation has been building 12 icebreakers and ice-strengthened vessels navigable in the Arctic at an intensified pace due to the heightened attention to the Northern Sea Route, the company's President Alexei Rakhmanov told Interfax on Monday.

"Construction of 12 icebreakers and ice-strengthened vessels has been under way. Three of them are powerful nuclear-powered icebreakers of the LK-60 class," Interfax cites Rakhmanov.

According to Alexei Rakhmanov, parallel with the construction of the icebreakers "the United Shipbuilding Corporation has been upgrading its facilities in the northwest of Russia. This is, among other things, aimed at providing for the production of the Lider advanced nuclear-powered icebreaker with a capacity of 120 MW."

"Shipbuilding, as is well known, includes a long production cycle. It inevitably takes years to work out the vessel's design plan that is to be submitted to the client," was Rakhmanov's answer to the question about the construction terms.