The latter's primary mission would be to ensure reliable year-round shipping in the Russian Arctic, including transit cargo along the Northern Sea Route as well as transportation of raw materials and natural resources produced from the continental shelf.

[10] In the late 2000s, increasing shipping activity in the Russian Arctic and the prospect of turning the Northern Sea Route into a year-round shortcut between Western Europe and Asia called for the development of more powerful icebreakers.

The 110-megawatt icebreaker, now referred to simply as "Leader" (or "Lider" as romanized from the Russian word Лидер),[9] was seen as the key for ensuring that large container ships could transit the northern passage in just ten days.

[15] The result, Project 10510, was a nuclear-powered icebreaker design intended for escorting cargo ships and tankers with a beam of 50 metres (160 ft) and deadweight tonnage of 100,000 tonnes year-round along the entire Northern Sea Route.

[21][22] On 15 January 2020, shortly before resigning, then Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev signed a governmental order allocating 125.57 billion rubles[note 1] of federal money for financing the construction of the first Project 10510 icebreaker for Rosatom from 2020 onwards and commissioning it by 2027.

[25] In March 2023, Kommersant reported that the construction of Rossiya's hull had progressed only by 5 % instead of the planned 15 % and the large steel castings such as rudder horns and propeller shaft brackets, originally ordered from the Ukrainian company Energomashspetsstal whose production facilities in Kramatorsk were damaged during the Russian invasion of Ukraine,[26] had to be re-contracted to a domestic supplier who cannot deliver them to the shipyard before August 2025.

[8][9] In 2015, students from the Saint Petersburg Art and Industry Academy collaborated with Central Design Bureau "Iceberg" to develop futuristic visions on what the next-generation nuclear-powered icebreaker could look like.