Lots of news out of the Russian Bear today

[Shammu]

Russia successfully tests nuclear-capable missile
JPost.com Staff, THE JERUSALEM POST    Aug. 7, 2007

Russia successfully tested an advanced missile, Army Radio reported Tuesday afternoon.

The Russian Interfax news agency reported that the missile, capable of carrying a nuclear warhead, was launched from a submarine in the pacific ocean, crossed over the continent and landed in the Barenz Sea, north of Europe.

Russia successfully tests nuclear-capable missile
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Georgia: Russia dropped bomb on village

 TSITELUBANI, Georgia (Reuters) -- Jets flown from Russia fired an air-to-surface missile at Georgian territory in an "act of aggression", Georgian Interior Minister Vano Merabishvili told Reuters on Tuesday.

Russia, which has a long history of tense relations with the former Soviet republic, denied that its airforce had flown missions in Georgian air space.

"Our radars show that these jets flew from Russia and then flew back in the same direction that they had come from ..." Merabishvili said.

"I assess this fact as an act of aggression carried out by planes flown from the territory of another state," he added.

Georgian officials say the ordnance hit the village of Tsitelubani, about 65 km (40 miles) west of the capital, Tbilisi, but did not explode.

 Shota Utiashvili, the head of the Georgian interior ministry's public relations department, earlier told Reuters that the Russian jets had dropped a 700 kilo (1,543 lb) bomb.

"Fortunately it didn't explode. If it had exploded it would have been a disaster," he added. He said nobody was hurt.

Russia's airforce denied that it had bombed Georgia, and said it had not violated its airspace.

"Russia's airforce neither on Monday nor Tuesday flew flights over Georgia," Colonel Alexander Drobyshevsky, the aide to the commander of Russia's airforce, told Reuters.

"Russia has not violated the borders of sovereign Georgia."

The village of Tsitelubani is near the city of Gori, and a few kilometers to the south of Georgia's breakaway South Ossetia region, a long-standing cause of friction between Russia and Tbilisi.

Russia provides moral and financial support for Georgia's rebel Abkhazia and South Ossetia regions. It has accused Tbilisi of pursuing anti-Russian policies.

Georgia's previous administration, under ousted President Eduard Shevardnadze, accused Russia in 2002 of sending fighter jets on sorties over its territory, but Moscow denied any involvement.

At that time, Tbilisi alleged that Russian jets had dropped ordnance on uninhabited areas of the remote Pankisi Gorge in north-east Georgia, near the border with Russia.

Relations between Russia and Georgia deteriorated sharply again last year when Tbilisi deported four Russian army officers, accusing them of spying.
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Moscow responded by withdrawing its ambassador from Tbilisi and cutting air, sea and postal links with Georgia. Russia also deported several thousand Georgians, saying they were illegal immigrants.

Tension is still high but there have been tentative signs this year that the crisis was easing. Moscow's ambassador has returned to Tbilisi and the two sides have been in talks -- so far unsuccessful -- to restore air links.

Russia dropped bomb

News video reporting the incident

[Shammu]

Russia says it won't deliver fuel to Iranian reactor without more openness
The Associated Press
Published: August 7, 2007

VIENNA, Austria: Moscow has warned Tehran it will not deliver fuel to a nearly completed Russian-built nuclear reactor unless Tehran lifts the veil of secrecy on suspicious past atomic activities, a European diplomat said Tuesday.

Separately, a U.S. official said Russia is not meeting other commitments that would allow the Iranians to activate the Bushehr nuclear reactor and suggested the delays were an attempt to pressure Tehran into showing more compliance with U.N. Security Council demands. Both men demanded anonymity in exchange for speaking to the AP because their information was confidential.

The increased Russian pressure comes at a time Iran already appears to be ready to compromise on a key international request — that it fully explain past activities that heightened suspicions it might be looking to develop a nuclear arms program.

Those fears led to Security Council demands that Iran suspend its uranium enrichment program — and to U.N. sanctions over Tehran's refusal to mothball the program, which can be used both to generate power and to make the fissile core of nuclear warheads.

In Algeria, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Tuesday that his country will continue pursuing nuclear energy and will refuse to talk with any countries that do not recognize Tehran's right to civilian nuclear power.

But Tehran last month told the International Atomic Energy Agency — the U.N. nuclear watchdog that is investigating Iran — that it would answer questions about past experiments and activities that could be linked to a weapons program. That — as well as a slowdown in enrichment activities and a decision to lift a ban on IAEA inspections of a reactor that will produce plutonium once it is completed — appeared aimed at deflecting U.S.-led moves to implement a third set of sanctions.

Last month, IAEA inspectors visited the reactor, near the city of Arak. And a second European diplomat told the AP that the Iran had recently began providing valuable information on "four of 10 questions" that the agency wanted answered.

IAEA officials declined comment. But concerns detailed by past IAEA reports have included suspicions that Tehran has secretly developed elements of a more sophisticated enrichment program than the one it has made public; that it might not have accounted for all the plutonium it processed in past experiments and that its military might have been involved in enrichment, a program that Tehran insists is strictly civilian run. Revelations that Tehran possesses diagrams showing how to form uranium metal into the shape of warheads have heightened concerns.

Russia has played a complicated role in attempts to pressure Tehran to comply with international demands.

It and China have blunted attempts by the U.S., Britain and France — the three other permanent Security Council members — to impose harsh U.N. sanctions and have hobbled efforts to move forward on new penalties this summer in the face of continued Iranian refusal to freeze its enrichment activities.

With Iran showing signs of that it is ready to shed light on some of its past unexplained activities, the U.S.-led push for new, more rigorous sanctions has turned into a "steep climb that has become steeper," the U.S. official said, describing Tehran's apparent willingness to end years of stonewalling as a "charm offensive."

Still, Moscow has used Bushehr, built by Russian technicians, as a lever. The first European diplomat said Tuesday that Russian officials told the Iranians about two weeks ago that Russian fuel roads to the Bushehr reactor would be held back as long as unresolved nuclear questions persisted.

That followed what European and U.S. officials described as Russian warning in March that the rods would be withheld as long as the Islamic republic ignored demands that it freeze uranium enrichment.

Russian officials, who at the time denied their country had delivered such a threat, had no immediate comment Tuesday. But Moscow in the past has represented delays in finishing construction — now 95-percent finished but eight years behind schedule_ as due to Iranian payment delays under the US$1 billion (€730 million) contract, something the U.S. official questioned.

"There are important problems between the U.S. and Russia" over Iran, he said. "But I've seen some stuff that indicates that the delays in providing fuel are more than routine problems over the contract."

Russian officials last week dismissed Iranian claims that the reactor could go on line later this year, saying payment arrears would mean at least another year's delay.

Russia says it won't deliver fuel to Iranian reactor without more openness

[Shammu]

Is Russia's Power on the Decline?
By Douglas Hanson
The drive-by media never ceases to amaze with their inability to notice world events, much less understand the global maneuvers in the War on Terror.  Ever since Secretary of Defense Gates told Vladimir Putin to butt out concerning his bid to muck up the US - European Missile Defense Shield, several developments have shown how he has been forced to scramble to maintain at least a minimum level of influence over world events.  Putin is an excellent practitioner of the bluff and bluster school of foreign policy, even as he struggles by "putting fingers in the dykes" of his dissolving empire.  The trend is not favorable for the ex-KGB agent and current President of the Russian Federation.

Russia vacates the Caucasus

In late 2003 during the a peaceful revolution in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia, known as the "Rose Revolution," the last vestiges of the old Soviet guard were ostensibly ushered out.  Despite this, Russia's military forces did not "pack up and leave" the country the next day.  On the contrary, Putin embarked on a campaign to obstruct and delay the withdrawal of his troops from Georgia.  He was not about to voluntarily give up a strategic chunk of land that allowed lines of commerce to Russia's aspiring nuclear partner, Iran, and smuggling routes for lucrative criminal enterprises.

Only because of Western political pressure and a constant influx of NATO forces and advisors did Russian units gradually depart from the area.  Even then, Russian "peacekeepers" have stubbornly held on to the so-called "breakaway" republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia and several key Soviet-era military installations.  Essentially, Putin was thumbing his nose at the international community and was placing the national security of the new democracy in jeopardy.

Thanks to a superbly executed strategic campaign by the US and NATO, the land bridge between Russia and Iran has been sealed, and with the backing of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), Putin has been coerced to withdraw more Russian troop contingents from major Soviet Cold War bases.  On June 27th it was announced that the Russian 62nd Military Base in Akhalkalaki is now officially Georgian property.  This Soviet-era base was actually established before the Russian Revolution in 1910.  Not only was it one of the oldest Soviet-era bases, it was also large.  To give you an idea as to the magnitude of this military base, in it's heyday it comprised:

    ...196 facilities on 12,824 hectares of land, among them seven headquarters, seven barracks, three mess-halls, one officers' house, a hospital, two schools - one of them a music school - one kindergarten, two music clubs and other technical facilities.

The loss of thie 62nd Military base is not only symbolic of Russia's demise in power, it is real.

The Breakaway Provinces

This still leaves the situation of Russian troops occupying the contested provinces, particularly Abkhazia.  Since Abkhazia's "declaration of independence," it has been under the watchful eye of Russian 'peacekeepers.'  Even though Georgian President Saakashvili conducted a decisive campaign last year in the Kodori Gorge area of Abkhazia, Putin will hang on to this area at all costs.  Simply put, Putin desperately wants to preserve control over the port of Sokhumi since it is a vital transit point for drug smuggling, a major source of cash for Putin, his fellow nationalists, and their criminal allies.

He is also eager to hold on to the town because its military bases were repositories  of nuclear and radiological materials including plutonium, uranium and cesium-137.  Other unverified reports say the Sokhumi's munitions depots also had chemical weapons.  Besides being a prolific source of cash for Mother Russia, this second motive for Putin's refusal to withdraw from Sokhumi is "personal."  Public disclosures as to the lack of security pertaining to nuclear materials, or of major damage to the environment due to lack of internationally accepted storage regimens would further damage Putin's standing in the world, even among his Western apologists.

But time is running out for Putin and his Russian "peacekeepers."  We now learn from Georgia's Defense Today  (the national security offshoot of the English language weekly, Georgia Today), that Georgia's acceptance into NATO is dependent on its maintaining the traditional territory of the sovereign kingdom including South Ossetia and Abkhazia.  Georgian Deputy Defense Minister, Batu Kutelia, emphasized that the NATO Membership Action Plan (MAP) permits no compromise on Georgia's borders.  He noted that NATO sees acceptance into the alliance only where,

    Georgia's territorial integrity is an issue which will be never questioned and if Georgia is adopted into NATO it will be adopted in its full territorial integrity.

That is, the conflict over the two provinces currently under Russian control will not be resolved in Putin's favor.

The Black Sea Fleet needs a new home

Often overlooked in the grand scheme of the world's power plays is Ukraine.  The go-soft-on-Putin crowd  and other critics of the Administration's Eurasian policies have slammed the Orange Revolution with a fervor normally reserved for GW's successful operations.  During the period from late 2004 through January of 2005, Ukraine reformers and nationalists overturned a fraudulent election and swept the Russian-backed President Victor Yanukovich and his pro-Russian party out of an office they had tried to steal.  Putin had openly backed the Yanukovich and his pro-Russian party.  Now Ukraine is on its way to being accepted into NATO.  In keeping with this, US and European personnel have ramped up their Ukrainian military training and assistance projects over the last year; these will likely evolve into long-term advisory operations.

Ukraine has one other critical capability that is virtually unknown in the other newly formed democracies in the region - it has a robust defense industry.  Its industrial infrastructure has enabled it to equip other small nations with newly manufactured combat systems of Soviet design.  Now veterans of the Red Army in the new democracies can quickly organize and train to achieve NATO operational standards.

Putin's forces have not totally withdrawn from Ukraine either, but the signs are that this will happen sooner rather than later.  It was reported this week in Voice of America News that the chief of the Russian Navy, Admiral Vladimir Masorin, is looking to move the Black Sea Fleet from its Ukrainian base in Sevastopol to a "permanent naval base on the Mediterranean Sea;" another acknowledgment of the decline of Russia's power.  Recognizing that the Mediterranean is strategically important to Russia, Admiral Masorin will look for an alternative to maintain a military presence in the region.  Translation: "we can't have the Russian Navy based in a NATO port; we need to go somewhere in order to salvage our reputation and influence in the Eastern Med."

Clearly, the Black Sea port of Sokhumi is out of the mix.  In another example of the curtailment of Russian world power and prestige, Putin must now work to stave off the inevitable return of Abkhazia to the Georgian central government or face continuing pressure from NATO and the US, while simultaneously looking for a new smuggling route for drugs and the transference of WMD materials and technology.  He may also need to buy time to clean up hazardous waste sites or risk a public relations and environmental disaster.

The VOA report suggests an alternative for the Russian Navy.  It said that Russia was looking to expand an existing naval base in the Syrian port of Tartus in order to homeport the ships of the Black Sea Fleet.  Not surprisingly, this was denied by Russian officials.  It may be that Putin and his Black Sea Fleet will get a "return trip" to one of the former USSR's Middle East client states, home to Assad's Baathist regime and the starting point of the Sunni "rat line" into Iraq.  And if this comes about, it will cement Putin's ties to a terror supporting country.

Let's hope our friends in the MSM, and the rest of the world take notice.  All things considered, it's no wonder Vladimir has been in a foul mood lately.

Is Russia's Power on the Decline?

[Shammu]

Russia says it won't deliver fuel to Iranian reactor without more openness

More openness? Yeah right, this statement coming from the most open country in the world historically. What this is, is just another Iranian/Russia smokescreen, on the nuclear issue. Both have mastered the verbal sleight of hand, when it comes to Iranian nukes.

[Shammu]

Russia strengthens Moscow missile defences

MOSCOW: Russia’s long-delayed Triumph anti-aircraft missile system was activated around Moscow on Monday in an upgrade of the capital’s air defences, Russian military officials said.

“The new anti-aircraft rocket system will defend Moscow’s sky”, Interfax news agency cited Colonel-General Alexander Zelin, chief commander of Russia’s air forces, as saying at an opening ceremony in the Moscow region.

An initial anti-aircraft regiment will be followed by a second next year, the director of the Almaz plant that designed the rockets, Igor Ashurbeily, told the news agency ahead of the ceremony. He said the company expected to begin production of the missiles for export in 2009.

In mid-July Russia successfully tested the long-delayed S-400 missiles, also known by their NATO designation SA-21 Growler. The missiles, which were first to be deployed in 2001, are designed to shoot down medium-range ballistic missiles and aircraft from as far away as 400 kilometres (250 miles), twice as far as the US Patriot missile.

Russia strengthens Moscow missile defences