On July 23, the Chinese People's Liberation Army Navy Type 052D destroyer Jiaozuo was anchored on the Lieutenant Schmidt Embankment in St. Petersburg, Russia. Luo Zhanhui, Chinese Consul General in St. Petersburg, was present to welcome the sailing. Upon arrival, the commander of the Leningrad Naval Base Andrei Saloshin and the Chairman of the St. Petersburg Council for Foreign Relations Yevgeny Grigoriev met with the captain of the “A” and then asked the crew to “eat some Leningrad Ice Cream”. The rare visit to the former capital comes as China increasingly backs Russia's position in its ongoing conflict with Nato and comes as it deploys troops to carry out an unprecedented campaign in Belarus, Russia's only ally in Europe, close to the Nato border. After the joint exercise. The Jiaozuo ship is the 23rd ship of this class to be commissioned and will be put into service in January 2022 after completion at Jiangnan Shipyard.
Type 052D is currently the main ship of the Chinese Navy's surface combat fleet. After entering service in 2014, two dozen ships of this class have been put into service. This makes it by far the most widely deployed destroyer in the world outside of the U.S. Navy's Arleigh Burke class. The Type 052D design is decades ahead of the most powerful Russian destroyers, as the Russian Navy has not built any new destroyers since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. .
According to reports, the Type 052D recently began deploying the YJ-21 hypersonic missile, which was first confirmed to be integrated into the Type 055 destroyer in 2022. Considered the most capable of its kind in the world. Although Russian government sources have repeatedly stated for more than a decade that new destroyers could be built to replace Soviet-built ships, the country's limited blue-surface operations have led to a greater focus on short-range surface ships and long-range submarines.