Russia navy considering buying French-built ship

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(Agencies)
Updated: 2009-09-19 22:58

MOSCOW: Russia has been negotiating the possible purchase of a military ship built in France, a Russian deputy defense minister said Saturday.

Vladimir Popovkin said it's too early to say whether an agreement for buying a Mistral-class helicopter carrier can be reached, but he added that it could mark an important step in modernizing the Russian navy.

If a deal goes through, it would be the first foreign ship that Russia's navy has bought in decades, and the first-ever from a NATO member nation.

Popovkin told Ekho Moskvy radio Saturday that along with the ship Russia was seeking to acquire technologies that would help raise the level of domestic shipbuilding industries.

"We are discussing the ship's purchase and, at the same time, we are talking about having facilities to produce such ships in Russia," he said.

He said that French technologies could help Russia build its own aircraft carriers if it decides to do that, but added that Russian shipbuilders strongly oppose the purchase.

Popovkin said that the government is yet to make a decision on whether Russia needs to build costly aircraft carriers.

Russia currently only has one Soviet-built aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, which is much smaller than the US aircraft carriers and has been plagued by mechanical problems and accidents.

The navy had to scrap numerous relatively new warships for lack of funds and could not properly maintain many others in the 1990s, leaving only a handful of big surface ships in seaworthy condition.

Russia's windfall oil revenues of the past decade has allowed the government to pump money into the military which has continued to rely on aging, Soviet-built weapons.

Rearmament efforts, however, have been slowed down by the poor shape of the Russian defense industries which have continued to rely on aging industrial tools and outdated technologies and suffered an exodus of qualified personnel during the post-Soviet economic meltdown.

The weaknesses of military industries were highlighted by the bungled development of the new Bulava intercontinental ballistic missile, which failed in seven of its 11 test launches. The failures left a newly built nuclear submarine weaponless and raised doubts about Russia's ability to complete the development of the missile which Russian leaders already had billed as the bulwark of the nation's strategic nuclear forces.

Popovkin insisted the Bulava's design was fine and blamed its failed tests on manufacturing flaws, resulting from post-Soviet industrial degradation.

The Bulava failures were rooted "not in design flaws, but technological faults, such as violations of technological norms and the use of substandard metals," Popovkin said. He added that a team of independent experts has been created to analyze the failures and tests will only resume after it makes its conclusions.

He said that Russia lacks some categories of modern weapons, such as intelligence drones. He said that Russia has bought 14 Israeli drones to help train the military how to use them while domestic industries are working to develop such craft.