An Admiral Kuznetsov-class warship, the vessel was to be 1,000 feet long, with a displacement of 65,000 tons. For a carrier of that vintage, the Varyag would be a middleweight, envisioned as the platform for several dozen short-takeoff, vertical-landing fighter jets, as well as 8 or 10 helicopters. By contrast, a U.S.S. Nimitz-class supercarrier has a load displacement of nearly 100,000 tons and room for at least 70 planes, many of them longer-range. The Varyag‘s keel was laid at the Mykolaiv Shipyard in southern Ukraine and, though not finished, it took to the water in 1988. Two years later the ship-in-the-making seemed to be on its way to joining Moscow’s Black Sea fleet.

Then the USSR fell apart in 1991, and Ukraine inherited the still-unfinished Varyag. It was starting to resemble an aircraft carrier, the sort of vessel found at the core of any first-tier navy. The ship had a distinctive ski-jump incline at one end, meant to help launch aircraft. (American carriers have flat flight decks equipped with mechanized slingshots for the same purpose.) But the Varyag lacked critical elements, including electronics and engines. In 1992, as the former Soviet republics tentatively stumbled out of communism, construction of the ship ceased altogether. Ukraine couldnt afford to complete the vessel, according to a dispatch from the Russian news agency ITAR-TASS. Still, TASS added, “the project has already cost the budget a pretty penny, and it would be absurd to scrap the ship.” Engineless and rusting, the Varyag languished at anchor.

In 1997 the National Agency of Ukraine for Reconstruction and Development followed the example of countless homeowners faced with too much old junk: It organized a garage sale. With the opening bid set at $20 million, competition for the powerless hulk was not exactly fierce. In November 1998 a well-connected Chinese entrepreneur named Cheng Zhen Shu said his company in Hong Kong, the Chong Lot Travel Agency, would pay the minimum...