The Great Migration to Vostok 2010 update

Peter the Great welcomes visitors, including the Russian ambassador to Syria and the commander in chief of the Syrian Navy aboard during her two day port visit to the Tartus roadstead:



I see from the video that the Russians also believe in the "if the foreigner doesn't understand you, just repeat it louder and slower until they do" method of foreign language translation. I hope the libs in Tartus were good, since this will be the last port they hit for a month and a half, according to the reporter.

Two days in Tartus, and its off to Egypt to follow the Moskva through the Suez Canal into the Red Sea.

Peter the Great has a date in Tartus...

Via.

 Flagship of the Northern Fleet, the heavy nuclear missile cruiser Peter the Great passed through the English Channel on Sunday on her way to the Straits of Gibraltar. In a few days she will be in the roadstead in Tartus, Syria where she will meet the the Black Sea Fleet missile cruiser Moskva and continue on to the Indian Ocean as a surface strike group.

The Ministry of Defense has told Izvestiya that the latest cruise by the Peter the Great will last not less than two months. The ship will visit Syria, Oman and India. Together with ships from the Black Sea and the Pacific Fleet, she will take part in exercises in the Far East called "Vostok-2010". There are also plans for two exercises in the Indian Ocean - first with a joint Russian task group and a second with the Indian Navy.
...
The idea behind the deployment is to "execute tasks in support of strategic and regional deterrence and support the maritime activities of the Russian Federation". By the way, experts say that the material expenditures don't matter when it comes to Russian military presence and professional development. "It's not a lot of money. It's more important to show that we are everywhere....One deployment like this for the crew is like finishing two academies", says former vice commander of the Navy, Admiral Igor Kasatonov.

"One deployment like this for the crew is like finishing two academies." Interesting thing to say when 50 percent of your crew is conscripted from the fall call up...

Pete and Chab's Excellent Adventure: Underway!

The force that the reporter describes as "a concrete deterrent force that any power that tries to interfere in the internal or external affairs of Russia must deal with" gets underway:



Navy Spokesman Captain 1st Rank Igor' Dygalo describes the deployment as a fulfillment of the vision as conceived by Navy CinC Admiral Vladimir Vysotskiy of the Navy returning to forward deployments and as having nothing to do with events in Georgia since both the deployment and the exercises with Venezuela had been planned months in advance.

Besides Venezuela, the task force will visit Tartus, Syria, which makes sense given this a few weeks ago. I assume that one of the other countries with whom the Russians will hold joint exercises will be Syria.

The reporter also noted that immediately upon getting underway in the Barents, NATO in the form of a P-3 Orion took notice, snapping pictures, making video and carrying out electronic reconnaissance. The reporter expects NATO to surveil the battle group every step of the way during the deployment.

Russians to Base Major Forces in Syria?

The Russian Mediterranean Fleet

Sevastopol’ may be traded for the Syrian port of Tartus

The Commander in Chief of the Russian Navy, Vladimir Vysotskiy is planning to increase the number of combat ships in Sevastopol’. Also, without waiting for a political decision about the fate of the Black Sea Fleet (BSF), he is already thinking about re-basing the BSF in the Mediterranean basin after 2017. Military experts consider the idea of rebasing the fleet to be rational, but consider the announcement to increase the number of vessels to be nothing more than populism. Since Russia doesn’t have any ships to spare the only way to increase the numbers in the BSF would be to take ships from other fleets.

After the publication of Mayor Yuri Luzhkov’s doubts about Ukraine’s claim to Crimea, the dispute over basing the BSF in Sevastopol’ has broken out with new force. The President of Ukraine, Victor Yushenko quickly signed an order to end the fleet’s lease in 2017 and Russian officials have for the first time quietly raised the idea of paying more rent. At the end of the week the CinC Russian Navy Vladimir Vysotskiy announced that Russia would raise the number of ships in the BSF to one hundred. This number is predicated on a Russian-Ukrainian basing agreement since there are 35 ships in the BSF now. True, the CinC hasn’t said how this increase would come about. Experts think the CinC’s loud announcements are baseless. The President of the Academy of Geopolitical Problems Leonid Ivashov considers that Russia wont be able to put 100 ships into the Black Sea for another 20 years at the earliest, “since we simply don’t have them. But, by this time, we may already have lost the main base in Sevastopol’. Therefore similar pronouncements must be considered adventurism.” Aleksandr Khramchikhin, the chief of the information-analytical department of the Institute of Political and Military Analysis agrees that to do this obviously involves a transfer of ships from the Baltic and Northern Fleets. “But why we would do this is not completely clear," says the expert.

So with regards to possible new addresses for a renovated BSF, among the most probable appears to be the Mediterranean basin. “A Russian Naval Base can be built there,” Vladimir Vysotskiy announced, noting that “Russia has strategic interests in the world ocean and we will pursue them." Experts welcome the stationing of ships in the Mediterranean Sea. “But today we hardly have a toehold in that basin,” Leonid Ivashov says. “Really only the Syrian port of Tartus, where we can agree with the Syrians to use it. But it’s not as simple as to just pick up and move there since we only have a tender based there now. Redeploying to the Mediterranean partly makes sense, but even then there has to be some sort of presence in the Black Sea since we have to guard our own shores. Therefore light forces will probably stay in Novorossiysk and the heavier forces, which admittedly aren’t very numerous, will transfer to Tartus, where a Russian base will be constructed,” Aleksandr Khramchikhin says.

Since Soviet times there has been a navy repair base in the Syrian port of Tartus. Right now it is a temporary deployment base for the BSF (for about a dozen warships) and there are three floating docks and the repair tender PM-61. Russian specialists are also working on expansion of the port and the construction of a pier in the neighboring port of Al-Latakia. The repair base could potentially receive the designation of basing point and then Navy Base.

Ivan Petrov

02 June 2008