The Ekaterina II class were a class of four battleships built for the Imperial Russian Navy in the 1880s. They were the first battleships built for the Black Sea Fleet. Their design was highly unusual in having the main guns on three barbettes grouped in a triangle around a central armored redoubt, two side-by-side forward and one on the centerline aft. This was intended to maximize their firepower forward, both when operating in the narrow waters of the Bosphorus and when ramming. Construction was slow because they were the largest warships built until then in the Black Sea, and the shipyards had to be upgraded to handle them.

Sinop was named after the Russian victory in the Battle of Sinop in 1853. She was laid down at Sevastopol by RoPIT in late June 1883, launched on 01 June 1887, and completed in 1889 when she began her trials.

She was converted to a gunnery training ship in 1910 before she became a guardship at Sevastopol and had her 12-inch guns removed in exchange for four single 203-mm guns in turrets. She was refitted in 1916 with torpedo bulges to act as 'mine-bumpers' for a proposed operation in the heavily mined Bosphorus. Both the Bolsheviks and the Whites captured her during the Russian Civil War after her engines were destroyed by the British in 1919. She was scrapped beginning in 1922.