The Russian naval facility in Syria is rather inconsequential to Russian Navy. It’s a facility with less than a dozen full time servicemen and two floating piers that will dock with ships shorter than 100 meters. It doesn’t strike me like some kind of a crucial must-have facility that’s worth fighting for. Moreover,…

Why? Because of EPA fleet economy standards. You can’t get there without selling lots of hybrids and electric cars.

Seems like an appropriate punishment for a serial predator, who was a cop no less.

Right now there are two square and earnestly capable 4x4s on the U.S. market; the Jeep Wrangler (187,111 sales this year so far) and the Mercedes-Benz G-Class (3,075 sales).

1. Isn’t the high inflation good for reducing the government’s fiscal burden when it comes to spending on social entitlements? Say the medical workers, pensioners, and veterans were already promised X amount of spending, but in real terms they will be getting less because of inflation.

Rostov-on-Don is a brand new submarine belonging to an updated kilo class.

Commissioned in 1982, that’s really old?

Russian people will accept the hardships because of “siege mentality”. When there exists some kind of perception of a national threat or some other “great national idea” (such as “liberate Syria from the evil ISIS and Obama, save Assad the lawful leader of Syria” or “liberate east ukraine”) people will be willing to…

The most immediate issue is the economy. Russian government is running deficits and its tapping into its wealth funds to finance the gap. However, supposedly, they run out of the reserve fund money by mid-2017 and the welfare fund in 2018 or so. After that, the Russian government is going to experience difficulties…

If you take a look at the list of Kilo customers, that’s an impressively long list. There is India, Vietnam, Algeria among the most recent customers. I am believer in the argument that the weapons that sell well in large quanities are actually the ones that don’t suck.

Russia still builds updated Kilos for export and its own navy. Six new upgraded Kilos should join the Black Sea Fleet shortly.

TV is pure propaganda, but besides TV there is plenty of Russian web based news, blogs, social networks that are hardly if at all controlled by the state, there is also radio, etc. Nobody is blocking anybody’s access to say Russian CNN or BBC. Anyone barely interested in getting real news, can have it.

I don’t believe the argument that Putin’s rating are high because of propaganda. Propaganda simply awakens already existing and deeply rooted vatnik mentality of ordinary Russians specially those living in provinces. In Russia, there is a small percent of educated intellectual and middle-management class who want…

And your point is...? pointless post.

Nah, as usual, a small bunch of radical activists end up making the most noise. The ones who hate Russia are the west Ukrainians from the far west Ukraine near the Polish border. West Ukrainians were bused into the Maidan protests of 2013-2014, and West Ukrainians still occupy the most important positions in Kiev.…

It wouldn’t be the first time somebody entered the presidential race for reasons other than becoming the president (the most notable recent example is Ron Paul who primarily run for the republican nomination to promote the loonie ideas of libertarianism and Austrian economics).

This big problem with Ukraine’s military industrial complex is that Ukraine’s air force barely purchases any new Antonov aircraft. Add to that rampant corruption, managerial incompetence, and the poor financing (most of Ukraine’s military industries are state owned). So, the only way Antonov can survive is with help…

It’s not normal... I think it’s a pure PR stunt meant for Turkish TV. It’s pretty sad actually. I often sympathize with Russia, but I don’t get why in the hell Russia would need to get adversarial with Turkey over a conflict in third world country like Syria.

It’s an old landing ship. Not match armanet there.

It’s an old landing ship.