The Ulyanovsk concept increased both defensive depth near Soviet bastions and reach beyond the main theater. The forces required to hunt Admiral Graf Spee provide the comparison: a capable carrier group in the Indian Ocean, South Atlantic, or South Pacific could threaten trade and demand a superior hunting force. NATO could not safely assume that one carrier group would defeat its Soviet counterpart, so containment might require two. Those groups would then be unavailable for the principal North Atlantic or Pacific contest. Diverting two NATO carrier groups to contain one Soviet group could therefore improve the balance in the Soviet bastions even if the raider never won a fleet battle.
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Ulyanovsk for bastion defence and distant diversion
A Soviet carrier could defend submarine bastions or deploy as a distant raider that forced NATO to divert multiple carrier groups to track it.