January 05, 2003

Russia's navy faces huge cutbacks

The Russian navy is to scrap one-fifth of its fleet because of a chronic shortage of funds.

Under the proposals, dozens of ships will be decommissioned to free up money to use on the navy's best vessels.

A senior Russian naval officer, Admiral Vladimir Kuroyedov, said the state simply could not afford to maintain its historic fleet.

Many of the navy's ships were built in Soviet times, when speed and not quality was seen as key.

The BBC's Sarah Rainsford in Moscow says the announcement will do little to revive the Russian navy's international image, which was tarnished following the sinking of the Kursk nuclear submarine in 2000 with the loss of 118 crew.

She adds that a decade or more of chronic under funding means that much of the fleet is now unseaworthy - more of a junkyard, as one analyst put it, than a navy.
In an interview with the newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda, Admiral Kuroyedov said the navy was receiving just 12% of the budget it needed to keep its ships afloat.

Poor Russia.
They are really having problems and are obviously very broke.
One hopes that what's happening to the Russian navy isn't a paradigm for the whole ship of state.
On the Russian army front, Putin has fired or been given the resignation of his 2 top generals (in Chechnya) and I remember hearing last New Year's that the rank and file soldiers hadn't been paid.
For a country that has put the lion's share of its resources into its military for decades, this blatant decline is ominous.
We can only hope that financial desperation doesn't impel Russia to sell off its vast arsenal of WMDs to the highest and most eager buyers, i.e. Al Queda and the other Islamist terrorists.
And maybe we should take a long look at how the flat tax mustn't be working in Russia...or maybe the problem is that capitalism, which fuels all state revenues, including taxes, in the first place, is still an "experiment" in Russia, but is alive and well here in the U.S.A.
It's always thrilling to me to see one of our beautiful carriers underway (or even in port) and to hear about our new ships online like the U.S.S. Ronald Reagan super-carrier and the U.S.S. New York, whose bow will be made from steel from the World Trade Center.
Go U.S. Navy!