A bad day for the Russian military

The Russian military suffered two major accidents today — a fire on the Ekaterinburg SSBN and the crash of a Su-24 on landing in Volgograd. The submarine fire was quite serious and burned for seven hours.  The Ekaterinburg was in dry dock at the time undergoing scheduled repairs. Its nuclear reactor had been shut down [...]

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Medvedev’s year-end assessment and Rogozin’s arrival

Yesterday, President Medvedev gave his annual state of the country address to the Federation Council. He spoke for a fair bit about the military, although there was little new information in what he said. Mostly, he just talked about how everything was getting better all the time and according to the government’s plan. But along [...]

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The problems facing Russia’s defense industry

A couple of weeks ago, Ilya Kramnik had Viktor Murakhovsky on his show on the radio station Govorit Moskva. Murakhovsky and Kramnik are both relatively well known experts on the Russian military and the discussion turned out to be highly informative. The whole 45 minute conversation is available here in audio form, while a Russian [...]

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Problems of Post-Communism, November 2011 Table of Contents

Volume 58 Number 6 / November-December 2011 of Problems of Post-Communism is now available on the mesharpe.metapress.com web site athttp://mesharpe.metapress.com. This issue contains: The Media Market and Media Ownership in Post-Communist Ukraine: Impact on Media Independence and Pluralism  p. 3 Natalya Ryabinska Business as Usual?: Gazprom’s Pricing Policy Toward the Commonwealth of Independent States  p. 21 Karel [...]

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New pay structure approved

On December 5, the Russian government approved the new pay structure for the Russian military. As before, the pay structure consists of two main parts: position pay and rank pay, with a 2:1 ratio between these two parts. In addition, there are various bonuses, such as danger pay, hardship pay, additional pay for working with [...]

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An Enduring Partnership: Russian-Indian military cooperation (Part 3: joint projects and future prospects)

And here’s the conclusion to the three part series on Russian-Indian defense cooperation, written last summer. New posts return next week. – Joint Projects In addition to purchases, Indian and Russian defense industries are working on a range of joint projects, some of which have already resulted in very successful products. As India increasingly shifts [...]

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