КраÑÐ½Ð°Ñ Ð—Ð²ÐµÐ·Ð´Ð° в четверг (Red Star Thursday)
News and notes from the other side of the Iron Red Velvet Curtain this week.
Navy Plans To Move To St. Petersburg (MOSCOW TIMES 01 NOV 07) Alexander Belenky
The Defense Ministry is planning to move the Navy headquarters to St. Petersburg in the latest instance of a federal institution being shifted to the former capital — and President Vladimir Putin’s hometown. Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov has instructed Navy chief Vladimir Vysotsky to draft a plan for the move from Moscow to the historical Admiralty and surrounding buildings in St. Petersburg, an unidentified Defense Ministry official said, Kommersant reported Wednesday. Serdyukov was acting on orders from the Kremlin, and the government has already been instructed to allocate funding for the transfer, the official said.
The move would be the second by a federal institution to St. Petersburg, following the Constitutional Court. Analysts told Kommersant that the decision was likely based on political considerations and could undermine command and control capabilities in the short term…The new location, over 700 kilometers from the Defense Ministry and strategic forces commands in Moscow, will pose significant communication challenges…The Navy has already asked for 15 billion rubles ($607 million) for the move, Nezavisimoye Voyennoye Obozreniye reported. Independent analysts, however, say the cost would be at least 20 billion to 25 billion rubles, which could be better spent on ships and hardware for a Navy that has been hit hard by a lack of funding since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the independent military weekly reported.
Calls to the press services of the Defense Ministry and Navy went unanswered Wednesday.
Russia launches SS-19 ICBM in service-life extension test
Excerpt from report by Russian state news agency ITAR-TASS
Moscow, 29 October: A practice launch of a silo-based RS-18 intercontinental ballistic missile was performed at the Baykonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan today.
Lt-Col Vadim Koval, spokesman for the Strategic Missile Troops (RVSN) Information and Public Relations Service, told ITAR-TASS that "the launch of an RS-18 missile (Western reporting name SS-19 Stiletto) was performed at 1200 Moscow time from a silo". "The ICBM was launched in the direction of the Kura test range in Russia’s Kamchatka," he said.
The RVSN spokesman said that "the launch was aimed at confirming the stability of the missile’s primary performance characteristics in prolonged service life". He stressed that "the forecast reliability and technical condition parameters of the RS-18 missile system, which is also designated UR-100N UTTKh, point to a theoretical possibility of prolonging its service life to 31 years".
(ed: Note that the current configuration of the SS-19 – the SS-19 Mod 3, first entered service in November 1979. It is a two-stage, liquid fueled and silo stored ICBM with 6 MIRVs. – SJS)
