He travelled to the same Sevmash shipyard in the port of Severodvinsk which seven years ago launched the Kursk, the submarine whose sinking with a crew of 118 last year triggered the weekend dismissals that shocked Russia's naval hierarchy.

Putin's disciplinary measures, variously described as sackings or demotions, have been seen as shots across the bows to chiefs in other areas of the armed forces seen as obstructing his reform plans that are to adapt the Russian army to post-Soviet realities.

The main casualties of the measures, decided after Putin received a report from Russia's senior prosecutor Saturday, were Northern Fleet commander Admiral Vyacheslav Popov and its chief of staff Vice-Admiral Mikhail Motsak.

A total of 14 high-ranking naval officers were sanctioned.

The head of Russia's joint chiefs of staff, General Anatoly Kvashnin, said that the high-profile demotions had "absolutely no link to the loss of the Kursk," but this view was widely discounted in the Russian media.

Kuroyedov and Kvashnin accompanied Putin at the commissioning of the Gepard, a nuclear-powered submarine whose first launch Putin attended in 1999 when he was prime minister.

Braving the Arctic winter on the White Sea, Putin told the Gepard's crew and builders that the vessel's commissioning was an event of national importance.

The Russian navy needs "a high degree of professionalism, a sense of responsibility and discipline brought to the point of pedantry," he said.

The third-generation Gepard is the last in the Bars series of 14 nuclear submarines of which the Northern Fleet now owns seven and the Pacific Fleet seven.

It is considerably smaller than the Kursk, with a crew of 63, displacement of up to 12,770 tonnes and a maximum speed of 33 knots.

Experts said it was among the fastest and quietest submarines in the world, with an enhanced rescue system.

The Sevmash shipyard's last submarine launch prior to the Gepard was the Tomsk in 1996. During the Soviet era Severodvinsk used to launch up to six submarines a year, according to official data quoted by the ITAR-TASS news agency.

Commentators have widely interpreted Putin's visit to the rundown shipyard as a move to help the Northern Fleet hierarchy swallow the bitter pill of the sackings.

Morale has been low since the August 2000 disaster in which all 118 crewmen died in a sinking which served to reveal the dismal state of the naval forces, run down after years of underfunding.

The daily Kommersant said that Saturday's report blamed naval chiefs for sending the Kursk to sea with a full set of weapons and not just the one missile and one torpedo needed for the purpose of the exercise in which it was due to take part.

It has been suggested that the explosion of a trial torpedo set off a fire that spread to the other torpedoes, setting off the high-powered blast that sent the Kursk to the bottom.

Most of the wreckage was lifted from the seabed during a perilous operation in October. Seventy-four of the 118 bodies have been recovered so far.

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