Moscow won’t have seen a traffic jam like it for a generation: intercontinental missiles on mammoth 16-wheel trucks, tanks and rocket systems threading through the capital to Friday’s Red Square parade.
Victory Day is an annual affair, but this will be the first time since the 1991 Soviet collapse that the big guns — even weapons of mass destruction like the Topol-M nuclear missile — join the parade.
For Russian president-elect Dmitry Medvedev, set to be inaugurated tomorrow, and for President Vladimir Putin, the World War II anniversary bash has a simple message: Russia’s military is back.
PHOTO: AFP
Yet some analysts believe the show of strength will be as hollow as the Topol missile tubes, which for obvious reasons won’t contain their deadly warheads.
“It’s just a PR exercise,” Moscow-based military analyst Alexander Golts said. “The armed forces are being used for propaganda purposes by the Kremlin.”
No one denies that there have been serious advances since the 1990s, when the remnants of the once mighty Soviet armed forces were defeated by a few thousand lightly armed Chechen independence fighters.
Putin has crushed the Chechens, resumed long-range nuclear bomber patrols, and used the obedient state media to inculcate Soviet-style patriotism.
But for all that — and for all the fanfare in Red Square this week — dire and systemic problems are eating away at Russia’s pretensions to great power status, analysts say.
As the respected Federation of American Scientists wrote in a blunt assessment last week: “Russia’s conventional military capability is so limited that it is virtually irrelevant.”
Even with a 16 percent increase in military spending this year, Russia’s defense budget amounts to 956 billion rubles (US$40 billion) — less than a tenth of the US$515 billion budget under consideration in the US Congress.
The human face of that vast spending gap is the grimy conscript teenager who carries most of the burden in Russia’s million-man military and who can appear a world away from volunteer US troops and their Robocop-like gear.
Russia’s deputy chief of staff, Vasily Smirnov, said that every third newly recruited conscript is physically unfit to serve, while one in two is barely educated.
Creating a professional army might seem to be the obvious answer, but Russia has tried and failed repeatedly since the end of the Soviet Union — mostly, analysts say, because of resistance from a bloated and corrupt top brass.
Technically, too, the military is struggling to keep up to 21st century standards.
“The technical gap with the United States is widening. We are pressing to have as many missiles and warheads and so on, when the problem is elsewhere. The revolution in the military sector over recent years has been in information technology, reconnaissance,” Golts said. “We still see things from an outmoded viewpoint.”
Despite resuming high-profile strategic bomber flights, many air force pilots sorely lack flight time, analysts say.
An embarrassing crash of a Russian Su-27 fighter on Lithuanian territory in 2005 was “mostly due to a lack of practice,” a recent report by Russia’s National Strategy Institute said.
As for the country’s navy, the Federation of American Scientists said in another report last week that Russian nuclear-powered submarines carried out just three patrols last year, compared with 54 by US submarines.
A much-hyped naval expedition into the Mediterranean at the start of this year, the first in eight years, involved a grand total of four battleships from the rusting and antiquated fleet.
Vitaly Shlylkov, a defense ministry advisor, acknowledges huge difficulties, but says a corner had been turned under Putin, thanks to a flood of revenue from energy sales.
“These are all growth difficulties and they will be dealt with, because the money is there,” he said. “Compared to the 1990s, it’s like night and day.”
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
GLOBAL COMBAT AIR PROGRAM: The potential purchasers would be limited to the 15 nations with which Tokyo has signed defense partnership and equipment transfer deals Japan’s Cabinet yesterday approved a plan to sell future next-generation fighter jets that it is developing with the UK and Italy to other nations, in the latest move away from the country’s post-World War II pacifist principles. The contentious decision to allow international arms sales is expected to help secure Japan’s role in the joint fighter jet project, and is part of a move to build up the Japanese arms industry and bolster its role in global security. The Cabinet also endorsed a revision to Japan’s arms equipment and technology transfer guidelines to allow coproduced lethal weapons to be sold to nations
Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia
ON ALERT: A Russian cruise missile crossed into Polish airspace for about 40 seconds, the Polish military said, adding that it is constantly monitoring the war to protect its airspace Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, and the western region of Lviv early yesterday came under a “massive” Russian air attack, officials said, while a Russian cruise missile breached Polish airspace, the Polish military said. Russia and Ukraine have been engaged in a series of deadly aerial attacks, with yesterday’s strikes coming a day after the Russian military said it had seized the Ukrainian village of Ivanivske, west of Bakhmut. A militant attack on a Moscow concert hall on Friday that killed at least 133 people also became a new flash point between the two archrivals. “Explosions in the capital. Air defense is working. Do not