Russia Revives Red Square Military Parade
May 4, 2008
More than 100 tanks, rocket launchers and armored vehicles, flanked by 8,000 soldiers, rattled across the tarmac, while sorties of jet fighters ripped through the sky as army generals saluted below.
The display wasn’t in communist North Korea or China. It was a practice for a May 9 parade of Russian military hardware on Moscow’s Red Square, the first since the Soviet era. The rehearsal on April 22 took place at Alabino, 50 kilometers (31 miles) west of Moscow, on an overcast morning and accompanied by a recording of Kremlin chimes.
“When you are dealing with other countries, you should not look weak,” says Konstantin Fedotov, 82, a retired colonel who took part in the first parade in June 1945 and is one of about 20 veterans watching the rehearsal. “We have to show that we are not toothless and can react to events against us now.”
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Russian Bombers Patrol Over Atlantic Ocean
April 25, 2008
Two Russian Tu-95 Bear strategic bombers and two Il-78 aerial tankers are carrying out routine patrols over neutral Atlantic waters, a Russian Air Force spokesman said on Wednesday.
Interceptions of Russian combat aircraft by NATO fighters are becoming a common occurrence again, after Russia resumed strategic bomber patrol flights over the Pacific, Atlantic, and Arctic oceans last August, following an order signed by President Vladimir Putin
“During the flights the crews develop their flying skills in northern latitudes, over unmarked terrain,” Colonel Alexander Drobyshevsky said.
He said the crews also perfect their in-flight refueling techniques, allowing the bombers to remain in the air for more than 24 hours and is considered extremely difficult “especially when the Russian planes are accompanied by NATO interceptors.”
“All Russian Air Force flights are performed…in strict accordance with international rules on the use of airspace over neutral waters without violating the borders of other states,” he also said.
Although it was common practice during the Cold War for both the U.S. and the Soviet Union to keep nuclear strategic bombers permanently airborne, the Kremlin cut long-range patrols in 1992. The decision came as a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the ensuing economic and political chaos.
However, the newly-resurgent Russia, awash with petrodollars, has invested heavily in military technology, and the resumption of long-range patrols is widely seen among political commentators as another sign of its drive to assert itself both militarily and politically.
Russia Closing Down Methodist Church
April 14, 2008
Members of a United Methodist congregation in Russia were without a church Sunday, April 13, after authorities closed it for running a Sunday School without government permission, the latest in a series of police raids targeting Christian education, Christians said.
The congregation in the western city of Smolensk was closed down by a local court March 24, on charges of “educational activity in a Sunday school without a corresponding license,” the church’s Pastor Aleksandr Vtorov said in a statement released by the news service of religious rights group Forum 18.
Investigation into the congregation and the school, attended by some four children, started after a complaint from local Russian Orthodox bishop Ignati Punin.
The complaint originally focused on a planned missionary college, but later the Sunday School became the target of a police investigation.
In published remarks, C. Vladimir Ryakhovsky of the Moscow-based Slavic Centre for Law and Justice said he fears the Methodist congregation’s liquidation increases the threat to other religious education.
“Almost every religious organization has a Sunday School…”I don’t know of one that has a separate education license. Do they intend to liquidate them all?” Elsewhere in Russia, adult religious education without a license has already led to raids and enforced closures. Forum 18 said. Human right group
Voice Of the Martyrs told BosNewsLife that “while the court’s decision to dissolve the church means loss of legal status rather than a complete ban, it does bar the Methodists from maintaining or developing any form of public profile as an organization.”
There has been concerns that non-Orthodox churches and Christian groups are facing a new crackdown in Russia, following some years of relative freedom. Analysts say the organizations are often viewed as a danger to the power base of outgoing Russian President Vladimir Putin and his allies. Authorities have not commented on the latest raids.
Russia: The World’s Richest Government
April 3, 2008
Russia had the second-highest number of billionaires in the world this year, but when it comes to wealth in government, the former Soviet Union is clearly No. 1.
Twelve billionaires now hold seats in the country’s parliament, with a total net worth of $41 billion, sitting alongside the less wealthy lawmakers, worth merely in the hundreds of millions.
Russian billionaires don’t limit themselves to legislative seats; there’s at least one billionaire governor, and the mayor of Moscow is married to another.
Russian Bombers Intercepted Near Alaska
March 26, 2008
NATO forces sent jets to escort two Russian long-range air force bombers patrolling neutral skies near Alaska on Wednesday, Russian news agencies quoted the defense ministry as saying.
Russia’s military has resumed its Cold War practice of flying regular patrols far beyond its borders, and in the last year has also sent turbo-prop Tu-95s over U.S. naval aircraft carriers and the Pacific island of Guam.
Accompanied by two Il-78 refueling tankers, the two Tu-95 “Bear” bombers flew for 15 hours over the Arctic and Pacific oceans, Interfax news agency quoted Russian Air Force spokesman Alexander Drobyshevsky as saying.
“In the course of the air patrol, long-range aviation aircraft were escorted by NATO jets in the region of Alaska,” said Drobyshevsky.
Originally designed to drop nuclear bombs, the Tu-95, Russia’s equivalent of the U.S. air force’s B-52, is a Cold War icon refitted for surveillance and maritime patrols.
Russia, in the eighth year of an economic boom driven by high global oil prices, has raised military funding after years of neglect following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The Russian navy has finished construction of mothballed submarines and restarted large-scale naval exercises that shortages of fuel and spare parts had made a rarity.
Analysts say the Kremlin is using its reviving military might to support a policy of projecting Russia’s power again on the world stage.
But some military observers say the Russian armed forces are still hampered by a shortage of combat-ready assets and that the exercises are primarily a public relations exercise.
http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSL2659163020080326
Russia Continues To Send Weapons To Syria and Iran
March 24, 2008
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert expressed concern over Russia’s continuing supply of sophisticated weaponry to Syria and Iran during a meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Jerusalem on Thursday.
Olmert stressed Israel’s fear that these weapons, including advanced anti-tank weapons and anti-aircraft missiles, could find their way into the hands of the Lebanon-based guerilla group Hezbollah, supported by Syria and Iran, which has threatened to destroy Israel.
Lavrov responded by saying that Russia has no knowledge of Hezbollah possessing Russian weapons, and that if Israel has any information on the topic, Russia would be happy to look into it.
Russia Harks Back To Cold War Strategy
March 9, 2008
According to Russian military analyst Pavel Felgenhauer, what Moscow is doing with these incidents is providing not a threat but a message.
“The message that we’re back again, that we’re still a kind of something, a chip off the Soviet Union, we have the capabilities, we have those heavy bombers that can carry nuclear weapons, which other nations do not have, and that we should be taken seriously,” he told The World Today.
Lawrence Korb, a senior fellow at the Centre for American Progress and former assistant secretary of defence in the Reagan administration, says the Russians have not adjusted to the fact that they are no longer a great power.
“Given the high price of oil in the last decade, their economic situation is obviously better, but their military is a shadow of its former self and they have very, very limited capabilities,” he said.
Mr Korb says the US Government will recognise that their posture toward the Russians has to change.
“We can just no longer assume that we can do whatever we want in the security realm without some sort of reaction,” he said.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has been reacting with threats to what he sees as the United States getting ever closer to his country, particularly with the American plan for parts of its missile defence shield to be installed in eastern Europe.
“To protect our national security, we have to respond”, Mr Putin said at his final media conference recently.
Mr Putin has also talked about the arms race beginning once again. But as for these recent demonstrations of power over US warships escalating beyond something symbolic, Mr Felgenhauer thinks that is highly unlikely.
“Risk is really minimal because no one really right now is on a war footing at all,” he said.
But he says it does, to some extent, amount to a resurgence of Cold War rhetoric and actions.
Russia Warns It Will Use Force To Back Serbia
February 24, 2008
The international split over Kosovo grew more ominous yesterday as Russia raised the spectre of using force to back Serbia’s bid to retain the territory.
Russia’s envoy to NATO warned the Western military alliance, which has a 16,000-strong peacekeeping force in Kosovo, and the European Union against formally backing Pristina’s declaration of independence.
“If the European Union works out a common position, or if NATO breaches its mandate in Kosovo, these organizations will be in conflict with the United Nations,” said Dmitry Rogozin. Russia believes the UN Security Council resolution on Kosovo does not authorize a unilateral move to independence.
“We, too, would then have to proceed from the view that in order to be respected, we must use brute force, in other words armed force.”
He spoke a day after a mob in the Serbian capital Belgrade torched the U.S. embassy. They were among 250,000 people attending a rally protesting Pristina’s unilateral declaration of independence move and Washington’s recognition of the breakaway state.
Vladimir Putin’s Nuclear Threat To The West
February 15, 2008
Vladimir Putin has delivered perhaps his most menacing tirade against the West yet, repeating threats to train nuclear missiles on Europe and warning of unspecified retaliation if Kosovo declared independence.
Addressing his last press conference as Russian president, Mr Putin mounted a defiant display that demonstrated more emphatically than ever the widening gulf between Moscow and its former Cold War rivals.
Vladimir Putin delivered his most menacing tirade against the West yet
Vladimir Putin used the language of the Russian street in his tirade
In a vintage performance, the former KGB spy laced almost five hours of invective with crude insults, threats and admonitions often expressed in the argot of the Russian street.
Reserving his greatest ire for the United States, which he accused of harbouring a colonial mentality towards Russia, Mr Putin again said that Europe would pay the consequences for a Washington-backed plan to erect a missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic.
“Our generals, our security council, consider these moves a threat to our national security,” he said. “We asked our partners to stop but no one listened to us. So if they continue we will have to react appropriately by retargeting our missiles.” Mr Putin also made similar threats against Ukraine if it joined Nato.
The Russian leader - often accused of returning his country to a state of autocracy - portrayed his nuclear threat as an act of democratic generosity, saying he was acting in the interests of Europeans who opposed American military expansionism.
Russian Bombers Buzzed US Aircraft Carrier
February 12, 2008
US Navy fighter jets were scrambled to shadow and intercept a Russian bomber which buzzed and circled over an American aircraft carrier over the weekend in a Top Gun-style incident in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
One Russian Tupolev 95 buzzed the USS Nimitz twice on Saturday, the Associated Press has reported an anonymous source as saying.
The plane flew over the carrier at an altitude of just 600m, similar to the “fly-bys” depicted in the Tom Cruise film. A second Russian bomber circled nearby.
The Russians had been tracked since they took off from Ukrainka and were monitored as they broke off from the rest of their formation and flew into Japanese air space.
The two Tupolevs continued on a course towards the Nimitz and a US guided missile cruiser, USS Princeton.
Four F/A-18 fighter planes were sent to intercept them when they breached an 800km perimeter. Two stayed with the Tupolev circling at altitude about 80km from the Nimitz while two followed the other bomber as it approached the carrier.
The US fighters trailed the Tuoplev as it buzzed the Nimitz. No words were exchanged between the US and Russian pilots throughout the entire incident.
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