The Kremlin has fiercely opposed NATO's plans to put Ukraine and Georgia on a track to membership. Russian officials have voiced hope that the Obama administration would drop the alliance's expansion plans and also cancel the previous administration's plan to deploy missile defense sites in Poland and the Czech republic.
Russia's windfall oil wealth over the last decade allowed the Kremlin to nearly quadruple its defense spending and start upgrading aging arsenals. The financial crisis has raised doubts about the government's ability to meet the military modernization goals, but Medvedev pledged that weapons orders won't be cut.
Military officials have said the government budgeted 1.5 trillion rubles ($43 billion) for weapons purchases this year, about 25 percent of it to be spent on upgrading the nation's aging, Soviet-era nuclear force.
"Let me mention the top priorities. The main one is a qualitative increase in the troops readiness, primarily of strategic nuclear forces. They must guarantee the fulfillment of all tasks of ensuring Russia's security," Medvedev said.
The military has said it will use the money to put more than 10 new intercontinental ballistic missiles on duty by year's end — a much faster pace of deployment than in previous years. It also intends to complete tests of the Bulava intercontinental ballistic missile and put it into service by the year's end.
Russian leaders have boasted of the submarine-launched missile's capability to penetrate missile defenses and have described it as the core of the military's future nuclear arsenal. But the Bulava has failed in five of its 10 test launches. Some experts blamed the failures on manufacturing flaws.
Medvedev encouraged the military Tuesday to focus more on new weapons purchases than repairs of the existing arsenals, saying that new orders were essential for keeping the nation's military industries afloat during the financial crisis.
The idea that NATO is a threat to Russia when the entire non-United States NATO can't put together the small NATO Response Force is laughable.
Of course, Medvedev's remarks about focusing on new purchases gives the game away. This isn't so much about defense as preserving the defense industry.
The Weekly Standard explains:
The fortunes of the Russian defense industrial sector at present make AIG and Bank of America look like the financial picture of health. The Russian industrial conglomerate umbrella company, Rostekhnologia (ROT) that has monopoly control over the entirety of the nation's defense industry is headed by Sergei Chemezov. He is also a life-long--and perhaps the number one--FOV (Friend of Vladimir Putin) in the Russian government, the two having first befriended one another when they served together in the former East German Democratic Republic (GDR) as KGB officers during the waning days of the Cold War. ...
A long-time Moscow colleague who has analyzed Russia's defense industry for the last three decades commented this month on these consequences of the Russian government's many years of post-Soviet, chronic neglect of the need for technology investment in the defense sector. "Very simply," he said, "we are now moving to the point where there will be no Russian defense industry that is on par with the front-line nations of the west that have a sizeable industry, and in some sectors or technologies Russian industry will even be inferior to Chinese industry."
So, is it the NATO threat or a Friend of Putin's bank account in peril?
