Russian weapons are being scrapped
Dmitry Medvedev had a telephone conversation with French President Nicolas Sarkozy.
The heads of state exchanged pre-New Year greetings and best wishes.
In connection with the discussion of the Russian-French cooperation on airborne helicopter docks of the Mistral type, the administrations of the presidents of the two countries prepared a joint message:
“Today, the President of the Russian Federation, Dmitry Medvedev, informed the President of the French Republic, Nicolas Sarkozy, that within the framework of an international tender for the supply of two amphibious helicopter-borne docking ships (DVKD) for the Russian Defense Ministry, announced by 5 in October of this year, the Russian authorities chose the proposal submitted by a consortium consisting of the French company DCNS and the Russian JSC OSK.
At the initial stage, the proposal of the consortium provides for the joint construction of two ships of this type with the subsequent production of two additional units.
Dmitry Medvedev and Nicolas Sarkozy welcomed the completion of this unprecedented cooperation project, which will promote the development of industry and solve the employment problem in our two countries and demonstrate the will and ability of Russia and France to develop large-scale partnership in all areas, including in the sphere of defense and security. ” .
Landing from France
The other day, the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation officially confirmed that it would purchase the Mistral universal amphibious assault ships from France. Talk about this deal went all last year, but the military has always previously clarified that this is only about intentions. And they did not even rule out that the order for such ships could be given to Russian shipbuilders.
Indeed, in the spring of this year, United Shipbuilding Company (USC) stated that it could have built its analogue of the Mistral in three years. “We guarantee that the ship will be built in this period. We have opportunities and platforms for this, for example, Sevmash, Yantar, or Admiralty Shipyards, ”said USC representative Igor Ryabov.
Nevertheless, the choice at the closed tender held at the end of November this year was given to Mistral, the developer of which is the French company DCNS. She will build two amphibious ships at her shipyards, two more under her license will be manufactured in Russia, presumably at the Yantar shipyard in Kaliningrad.
According to expert estimates, the total amount of the contract with the French is 1,5-2 billion euros. This is the largest military equipment import deal since armory supplies to the Soviet Union under Lend-Lease during the Great Patriotic War.
Revolution in army minds
For the Russian MIC, the choice in favor of the Mistral was a real shock. The same USC was even going to file a complaint against the Ministry of Defense with the Federal Antimonopoly Service for allegedly created artificial obstacles in preparation for the tender. However, there was no shock for weapons specialists. Back in April of this year at the exhibition-forum “Army and Society” in Moscow, the then head of the Armed Forces of the Russian Armed Forces Vladimir Popovkin (now he is the first deputy minister of defense) harshly criticized the defense industry for ceasing to create products suiting the military.
“We cannot buy barreled artillery with a range of fire up to 30 km, when it is 70 km from the enemy,” he said. “We will not purchase the BTR-80 because I don’t know how to leave it through the side door.” He had no better opinion about the infantry fighting vehicle BMP-3.
“The officers and soldiers do not want to get inside this car, they are riding on the roof,” said Popovkin. Both he and other military leaders have since made it clear more than once that they will only buy such combat equipment that gives parity with foreign armies in the event of an armed conflict. And if the domestic defense industry is not able to adjust to the production of modern types of weapons, so much the worse for it - there will be suppliers abroad.
This reversal, according to experts, marks a real revolution in the views on how and what should be equipped with the Russian Armed Forces. “All the current majors and lieutenant colonels from the cadet years were told that Russian weapons are the best in the world, it simply couldn’t come to anyone’s mind,” reminded Trud-7 of the Association of Military Political Scientists Vasily Belozerov.
“With the removal of the domestic shipbuilding industry from the order for a universal landing craft, it became absolutely clear that in the long term the national defense industry is no longer the exclusive supplier of the Russian Armed Forces,” Konstantin Makienko, deputy director of the Strategy and Technology Analysis Center, told Trud-7. “Purchasing weapons and military equipment (IWT) will now become a regular practice.”
At the same time, Makienko believes that in the near future it will be limited purchases. First of all, the Ministry of Defense will buy or already buy those products that we ourselves cannot produce or whose production is simply unprofitable.
The notorious Drones. Their development in Moscow, Moscow region, Kazan, Izhevsk, Irkutsk has been going on since the mid-1990s, but not a single sample has satisfied the military. First of all, due to the fact that the image transmitted from them, firstly, is fuzzy, dances, and secondly, it cannot be tied to the coordinate grid.
As a result, after the war with Georgia, the Ministry of Defense purchased for 53 million dollars from the Israeli company IAI a batch of lightweight portable mini-UAV complexes Bird-Eye 400 (range - 10 km), medium I-View devices MK150 (radius - 100 km) and Searcher Mk II medium-heavy drone (fly 250 km). True, the military made a reservation that Israeli drones were acquired not so much for use as for our factory specialists to figure out how they work and learn from their experience to create their own analogues.
“If our defense industry will be able to produce high-quality drones, then please, we are ready to buy them,” said the head of the military department, Anatoly Serdyukov.
Air Force and Navy need most
As an example of the unprofitability of production, experts call sniper small arms. In place of the popular, but outdated Dragunov sniper rifle, our designers developed several successful models, for example, the Vintorez sniper complex, the Val sniper machine, but they are made almost by hand, as by-products in weapons factories, they have a high cost.
According to experts, it is unprofitable to establish their mass production, since our army requires relatively little high-tech small arms - from 5 to 10 thousands of units. It is better to buy it abroad from well-known manufacturers that have long specialized in such products. By the way, three years ago, without much advertisements, the Ministry of Defense and the FSB already bought a small batch of English sniper rifles L96 for their special forces units at a price of 5 thousand dollars each.
In addition to the Mistrals, drones and sniper rifles, the Ministry of Defense acquired abroad a trial batch of combat equipment of a FELIN fighter, Thales and Ethernet cameras for tanks T-90 (all from France), climbing equipment for the personnel of two mountain rifle brigades deployed in the North Caucasus (purchased from Germany). Experts believe that in the next two to three years, the range of military imports will increase significantly.
“Most purchases will be for the Air Force, the Navy fleet and the Ground Forces, ”predicts Konstantin Makienko.
Parts will be purchased to the kit
Concerning aviation, then, most likely, the Russian Su-27 and MiG-29 fighters will be understaffed by French and Israeli avionics. Rosoboronexport has long been selling Russian aircraft to other countries only with imported electronic components, in particular navigation and optoelectronic systems.
Russian pilots already had the opportunity to evaluate the merits of foreign avionics. In 2009, Algeria unexpectedly returned to Russia earlier delivered to him under a contract for 500 million 24 fighter aircraft MiG-29, on which stood the French navigation system Sigma-95. All airplanes entered the combat flight units of Russia, which made the pilots very happy, because the MiGs who did not like the Algerians turned out to be much better than those they had previously flown.
For the needs of the fleet, ready-made ships will not be procured in the foreseeable future, individual components and assemblies that are not even in the blueprints of Russian designers will be imported. It is primarily about air-independent power plants (VNEU) for diesel submarines. The use of such systems allows the boat to be underwater for 20 days without recharging the batteries. The relevant technologies are France, Germany and Sweden. Most likely, we will purchase VNEU from the first two countries.
Attack armored fell
Armored is considered to be the most backward in the Ground Forces. According to experts, practically all tanks, armored personnel carriers and tracked infantry fighting vehicles were created 20 – 30 years ago, are hopelessly morally obsolete and need to be replaced with modern models. Research and development work was discovered for all these types of equipment, but they did not end with any breakthrough developments. For example, it was not possible to create a new T-95 tank to replace the T-90 tank that does not suit the military.
As a result, the Ministry of Defense agreed in June on 2010 about the purchase in Italy of light armored IVECO armored vehicles, which will first be used simultaneously with our BTR-80 and Tiger armored vehicles. In addition, negotiations are now under way with the Italians to open an IVECO licensed production facility at one of the Russian enterprises, presumably at KAMAZ.
Not all experts are satisfied with this development. “The import of armaments carries big risks, since foreign suppliers can at one point impose a trade embargo on the delivery of military equipment to Russia, and we will remain at the bottom of the pool,” says Anatoly Tsyganok, director of the Center for Military Forecasting.
“These risks are easy to avoid if you choose partners based on the principles of their maximum depoliticization,” - in turn, believes Konstantin Makienko. In his opinion, such partners for us are France, Italy and Israel.
The numbers:
2 billion euros will be paid by Russia for Mistral landing ships;
53 million dollars received by Israel for drones;
250 million euros - contract price with IVECO for the supply of armored vehicles;
5 million dollars the Ministry of Defense spent on the purchase of British rifles L96
Information