 On 8 May 1947, United States Secretary of the Navy James V. Forrestal informed the United States Department of State that the United States Department of the Navy wanted 480 of the 585 combatant ships it had transferred to the Soviet Union for World War II use returned, "EK-3" among them.Negotiations for the return of the ships was protracted, but in October and November 1949 the Soviet Union finally returned 27 of the 28 patrol frigates transferred in Project Hula.The only exception was "EK-3", which had run aground during a storm on 17 November 1948 off Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky and been damaged beyond economical repair.