Russia Loses in Mock War

[Specforces]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/mai...18/ixworld.html


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Putin's nuclear show blows up in his face

Russia's biggest military exercise since the collapse of communism flopped yesterday, ruining an attempt to project Vladimir Putin as a global leader and reaffirm the country's status as a nuclear superpower.

With Mr Putin and a host of military officials watching from the nuclear submarine Arkhangelsk, two intercontinental ballistic missiles went wrong during a firing from a submarine believed to be the Novomoskovsk. They were aimed at Kamchatka on the Pacific coast. A malfunctioning satellite was blamed.


Putin promised that Russia will again be a global power
The Russian website gazeta.ru said one of the missiles blew up shortly after firing. The navy refused to confirm the accident.

Television, which had been leading news programmes with glowing reports of the exercises, quickly reduced them to a short bulletin.

For Mr Putin, decked out in naval garb, it was an embarrassing setback.

With less than a month before presidential elections, he has sought to cast himself as a hard man in the mould of the old Soviet leaders.

He has also pledged to preside over a return to the days when Russia was a powerful global player.

Last week he said the collapse of the Soviet Union had been a "national tragedy of enormous scale".

Speaking before the exercises, which began at the end of January and are due to last until the end of this month, Mr Putin appealed again to the Soviet nostalgia that many Russians still feel.

"The Soviet Union and its power, primarily projected through its nuclear forces, was a factor that balanced power in the world," he said. "We need to maintain this power and we will."

American military planners may take some satisfaction at the Kremlin's embarrassment, but it is unlikely to help the steady souring of relations.

Some analysts predict a further deterioration over the coming months as the former Cold War enemies skirmish over influence in central Asia and the Caucasus.

In recent months America has also stepped up pressure on Russia to improve its democratic record.

Ties between Moscow and Washington are significantly cooler than two years ago when Russia gave wholehearted backing to the war against terrorism.

Last week Col Gen Yuri Baluyevsky, the first deputy chief of the general staff of the armed forces, said that the current exercises were prompted partly by concerns about American policy.

Other Russian officials have spoken out against the expansion of Nato into the Baltic and America's decision to scrap Cold War arms treaties and push ahead with missile defence.

Sergei Ivanov, the defence minister, recently threatened to pull out of the European treaty on conventional forces, which underpins military stability on the continent, because of concern over US expansion.
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To my suprise, I actually feel kind of bad for Putin. It's like a short guy with an inferiority complex buying platform shoes, only to have them fall off in front of everybody