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Related: Effects on Nature • The Bear GrowlsRussia Rejects Claims Of Drugged Diplomats; Suggests They Were Drunk Russia's Foreign Ministry rejected U.S. reports that two officials traveling with diplomatic passports were drugged while attending a conference in St. Petersburg last year, suggesting instead that they might have had too much to drink. The statement, made on October 4 by Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, came in response to concerns made public by the U.S. Russian Subs Are Reheating a Cold War Chokepoint As the GIUK gap returns to importance, NATO must look to regenerate its anti-submarine forces. The recent U.S. promise to fund upgrades to Iceland’s military airfield at Keflavik is no diplomatic bone thrown to a small ally. The improvements will allow the U.S. Navy’s new P-8 Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft to keep an eye on Russia’s increasingly active and capable submarine force in a region whose importance is rising with the tensions between Moscow and the West. In short, the Greenland-Iceland-UK gap is back. During the Cold War, the maritime choke points between Greenland, Iceland, and the UK were key to the defense of Europe.
theconversation Thirty years after Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev signed a landmark nuclear arms treaty which laid the foundations of post-Cold War relations between the West and the Soviet Union, recent developments suggest that the Kremlin has quietly restarted the nuclear arms race with the deployment of a new generation of nuclear weapons which could wind back the clock to the bad old days of superpower confrontation. Of course, there have been episodes since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 that have put considerable strain on relations between the two powers – chief among them Yugoslavia, Iraq, Chechnya, Georgia, Libya and Ukraine. But the latest news from Russia suggests a more fundamental shift. According to a report in the New York Times US officials confirmed on February 14 that the Russians had secretly deployed new ground-launched cruise missiles known as SSC-8s with a range capability of between 500km and 5,500km in the area around Volgograd in south-west Russia.
So much for the Russian threat: Putin slashes defense spending while Trump plans massive buildup Russia, led by supervillain Vladimir Putin, intent on the domination and destruction of the Western world, has just slashed its defense budget — and no one really noticed. Figures from the Russian Federal Treasury show that the defense budget has been cut by 25.5 percent for 2017, falling from 3.8 trillion rubles to 2.8 trillion rubles. IHS Jane’s, one of the most authoritative sources on defense news, said the move represents “the largest cut to military expenditure in the country since the early 1990s.” Let’s put this in context before we move on: The cuts come after significant military budget increases in recent years (averaging about 19.8 percent a year since 2011) as Putin sought to revamp the Russian military and replace a massive chunk of Soviet-era hardware by 2020. There’s also some quibbling going on over the figures used by Jane’s. Some experts believe the cut is more like 7 percent when the impact of debt repayment to defense industry firms is taken into account.
Zapad 2017: NATO Should Be Keeping an Eye on Russia's Training Exercises It all started with a military exercise in 2008. “Today, Georgia; tomorrow, Ukraine; the day after, the Baltic States; and later perhaps time will come for my country, for Poland!” Those words were said at Tbilisi Square on August 5, 2008, by the late Polish president Lech Kaczyński in the presence of five European heads of state who came in a gesture of solidarity with recently invaded Georgia. Almost ten years later, this statement appears like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Today an increasing number of security pundits reflect on what the next Russian military large-scale exercise, Zapad 2017, may bring.
Russian Fighter Jet Intercepts a B-52 Over the Baltic Sea A tense exchange near Russia’s border as European Command-led exercises get underway. A Russian Su-27 fighter jet intercepted a U.S. Air Force B-52 bomber about 10 a.m. over the Baltic Sea as the American warplane was flying a routine mission in international airspace, according to the Pentagon, which confirmed an earlier report by the Russian state media news agency Tass. On June 1, Air Force officials announced that they would deploy the B-52s to the region to support the Operation Saber Strike, BALTOPS, and Arctic Challenge exercises, along with the members of various NATO militaries as well as Finland and Sweden. “Training with Allies and joint partners improves coordination between Allies and enables the U.S.
What Does the Intercept of a U.S. B-52 Bomber Tell Us About Russia? Somedays, our good friends at the Kremlin branch of the Alt-Right Propaganda Machine formerly known as Russia Today tell us more than I suspect their bosses would really like us to know. Or perhaps they have just gotten so used to putting anything and everything out there that they no longer even realize they are accidentally dropping useful intel about their own nation into the public domain. Today is a perfect example. A few hours ago, RT published a story about the interception of an American bomber by a Russian fighter plane in international airspace over the Baltic, somewhere "close" to Russian territory. How Russia Targets the U.S. Military In the fall of 2013, Veterans Today, a fringe American news site that also offers former service members help finding jobs and paying medical bills, struck up a new partnership. It began posting content from New Eastern Outlook, a geopolitical journal published by the government-chartered Russian Academy of Sciences, and running headlines like “Ukraine’s Ku Klux Klan — NATO’s New Ally.” As the United States confronted Russian ally Bashar Assad for using chemical weapons against Syrian children this spring, the site trumpeted, “Proof: Turkey Did 2013 Sarin Attack and Did This One Too” and “Exclusive: Trump Apologized to Russia for Syria Attack.” In recent years, intelligence experts say, Russia has dramatically increased its “active measures” — a form of political warfare that includes disinformation, propaganda and compromising leaders with bribes and blackmail — against the United States.
The Kremlin’s VPN Ban Has KGB Roots (Op-ed) Putin went after technology last week and it probably won’t end well. The ban on Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), along with the move to de-anonymize messengers, are designed to weaken advanced internet technology that protects against government intrusion online. The amendments signed by Putin have two aims: Тo make it impossible to access blocked websites using VPNs, which helps users hide their identity online, and to make it possible for the Russian secret services to immediately identify users on instant messengers. There were three ways the government could have gone about this. First, it could have invested in new surveillance technology. But that would have meant committing to a desperate game of technological catch-up with the developers of tools designed to circumvent restrictive measures, in order to try to decipher their techniques.
The Ousting of Hundreds of U.S. Diplomats From Moscow, Explained In response to fresh sanctions proposed by the U.S. Congress, Russia has ordered the U.S. to slash its diplomatic staff in Russia by hundreds of people. Amid reports that this will dramatically increase wait times for visa processing, the RBC news outlet on Monday published an overview of what the measure means for the people involved and the workings of the embassy. Here's what you need to know. How many people? Currently, there are around 1210 U.S. diplomatic employees in Russia, RBC estimates.
Putin Says Russia Held Back on Counter-Sanctions for a 'Long Time' Russia held back on introducing sanctions “for quite some time,” but lost hope after Washington’s “unprovoked move,” President Vladimir Putin said in a state television broadcast on Sunday. The interview with prominent presenter Vladimir Solovyov on state television Rossia-1 came two days after news broke that Russia would take counter-measures in response to new sanctions passed by the U.S. Senate, which the White House has said President Donald Trump intends to sign. The number of American diplomatic personnel in Russia will be slashed by 755 people by September. Putin’s Trolls Used the Texas Church Massacre to Sow More Chaos – Mother Jones Mother Jones illustration False information inundated social media after Sunday’s mass shooting in Sutherland Springs, Texas, and Russian trolls were in the thick of it. Conspiracy theorists like Mike Cernovich led the way, falsely branding shooter Devin Patrick Kelly as a member of the far-left antifa movement, and the Russian media outlet RT America had the lie posted on Facebook for five hours, according to BuzzFeed. The hashtags #antifa, #sutherlandsprings and #texas were three of the top 10 recorded over the weekend by Hamilton 68, a nonpartisan research project that tracks Russian influencers on Twitter in real time. Much of last week’s congressional hearings focused on Russia’s interference operations on Facebook during the 2016 election, when Kremlin-planted ads and fraudulent posts reached upwards of 130 million users. Bots amp up the volume on a message by retweeting at rates far faster than any human and by adding legions of fake followers to specific accounts.
Russia's New Stormtrooper Combat Suits Leave it to Russia to create nuclear war-resistant combat gear fit for a modern Stormtrooper. Don't you hate it when a nuclear bomb goes off and your watch stops working? Russia feels your pain, which is exactly why they've gone ahead and invented a suit that won't just withstand a nuclear blast - it's a peek into the future of nuclear warfare. via GIPHY One of the latest upgrades to the intense Ratnik 3 combat gear designed for the nation's military is a self-winding, shockproof watch that is resistant to electromagnetic impacts and water.
This New Russian Sniper Rifle Is Redefining 'a Safe Distance' Common Russian battle tactics, currently on display in Ukraine and elsewhere, uses three rows of snipers in battle. Although the first two rows present a challenge for even the best marksmen, it’s the back row—which can be around 2,000 yards away from a target—where Russia places its most elite. Now a U.S. Army report says that this last row of warriors have become even more deadly, thanks to a new weapon—the T-5000 Tochnost rifle. Advertisement - Continue Reading Below