Russia Increases Defence Spending.

[Mr Dave]

[url]http://en.rian.ru/mlitary_news/20100730/160003543.html{/url]

So it seems the Russians are planning on re-equipping their navy with new Submarines (good job we arent getting as many Astute class submarines as we were going to and getting rid of Nimrod MRA4/only getting 9 operational frames)

Will this have any effect on the SDR? Is it too late for that now? Will it affect us anyway?

Suprising that they are building french ships under licence though and buying more Sukhoi 34s and presumably su-30s between now and when the Su-60 is supposed to be entering service.

[Oily Nails]

Mr Dave said:

http://en.rian.ru/mlitary_news/20100730/160003543....

[paolow]

Eh? I get this bit which makes 60% to me:

Russian defense spending will increase by 60 percent, to more than 2 trillion rubles ($66.3 million) by 2013 from 1.264 trillion ($42 million) in 2010, a leading Russian business daily said on Friday.

but then they say:

Besides this, Russia is planning to spend 80 billion rubles ($2.65 billion) on 60 Su-family fighter jets starting 2010, and buy 26 MiG-29K Fulcrum-D carrier-based fighter jets, with the expected contract estimated at about 25 billion rubles (more than $828 million), a military aircraft plant manager told the paper. The plans also include the purchase of 32 Su-34 Flanker fighter bombers under the 2008 contract (a single plane then cost more than 1.1 billion rubles ($36.4 million), he said.

So one of these su-34 makes up 50% of the entire forces budget???

[Holst]

I think the millions in the first paragraph should be billions.

[Frankeh]

Cool. Are we going to get another arms race?

[FourWheelDrift]

Holst said:

I think the millions in the first paragraph should be billions.

Rubles have dropped in value at the announcement of the defence spending.