Basic values

The Russian military fleet expands its presence: the bases are placed from Crimea to Sudan

The Russian military presence in the southern strategic direction expanded to Sudan, where next to the main commercial port of the country on the Red Sea-Port Sudan-it is planned to deploy the naval base, or the “Material and Technical Support Point”. The final agreement with the Sudanese authorities has not yet been signed, but the main parameters are agreed. Free rental for 25 years with the right to extend by another 10; A garrison of up to 300 people with extraterritorial immunity rights, moorings on 4 ships, "including ships with a nuclear power plant."

Russia will supply the Sudan for free weapons and equipment, which is planned to draw up a separate agreement, including it should provide Port Sudan air defense systems, where the Sudden fleet is based on several patrol boats. To build the infrastructure of the new base (residential and administrative buildings, warehouses and workshops, the arrangement of berths, etc.) will have to be at their own expense. To the south of Port Sudan there is a large international airport, which the Russian military will also be able to use. The surroundings of the new base are deserted, hot climate: from +30 ° C in winter, to +45 ° C in the summer. Due to the proximity of the sea-disgustingly humid.

During the Cold War, the Marxist regime was established in neighboring Ethiopia after the 1974 military coup (revolution). Cuban and Soviet troops (advisers) were based in the country, including warships on the Red Sea in Eritrea, which was then part of Ethiopia. They (including the Navy) fought against the Erytrey and Tigerian rebels (“Three Tankers, Three Merry Friends and Mengist Haile Mariam” - a popular saying of the Soviet military in Ethiopia). In 1991, the rebels won, and the Ethiopian leader Mengiste fled the country. Eritrea became independent, Ethiopia lost its exit to the sea, and our Navy sailed home. There was still a Soviet military presence nearby - in South Yemen, at the exit of the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean, when socialism was also built there in the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen. But from there, our Navy had to retire even earlier than from Ethiopia, in the conditions of a total civil war.

After the end of the Cold War, Russian military power and presence abroad were consistently folded. In the two thousandths under Vladimir Putin, bases in Cuba and Kamran in Vietnam were closed, peacekeepers from Kosovo were withdrawn, where they controlled the airport occupied in 1999 (“Throwing to the Profin”). The bases in Georgia were closed and military personnel from Azerbaijan were withdrawn. The material and technical support point in the Syrian Tartus wound a miserable existence.

But then the trend changed to the opposite: a new strategic expansion began and continues at the same time as the growing deterioration of relations with the West (USA), which turns into a global confrontation. When the Americans began an operation in Afghanistan against the Taliban movement that ruled there, which provided the asylum of Osama Ben Laden, then deployed a passage of supplies in Manas (Bishkek Airport). In response to Kyrgyzstan, the Russian Kant air base urgently appeared - the first new foreign base of the post -Soviet period. As the anti-terrorist operation in Afghanistan, the USAs was finally closed in 2014-formally at the request of Bishkek and to considerable pleasure in Moscow. The Russian base in Kant remained, although there is no military-technical meaning in it. In February 2017, during a meeting with the next president of Kyrgyzstan, Putin said: “We have no need to place a military contingent here.” Like, the Kyrgyz will say - we will leave on the same day. But they do not say.

In Kant, up to 500 people serve, $ 4.79 million per year pay to the Kyrgyz. The combat potential of the Kant base is close to zero.

It has not been used in any real operations, but it means the presence of Russia in the region.

Russia has retained a number of some objects of the unique Soviet military-technical infrastructure in the territory of the former USSR: air defense lands, and the Strategic Missile Forces in Kazakhstan, the window “Window” in Tajikistan (electronic-optical monitoring of the near-Earth space), the Center for the low-frequency communication of the Navy and the radar of the SPRN system in Belarus. After the war with Georgia in 2008, peacekeepers in Abkhazia and South Ossetia replaced the combat Russian army units. There is a small garrison in Transnistria, also performing peacekeeping functions. There is a base in Armenia, and now peacekeepers in Karabakh. The largest once foreign military base of the Black Sea Fleet (Black Sea Fleet) in Sevastopol turned into a powerful Crimean fist of diverse forces and means, which was previously impossible because of Ukrainian restrictions.

According to the NSSh, Valery Gerasimov, the Crimean group dominates in the Black Sea and is able to heat NATO ships when they are just going through the Bosphorus.

In 2015, Russia sharply expanded its military presence in Syria. There are no airbase near Tartus, although now, when this is previously rapidly rebuild and expand, there are plans to build a runway (runway) somewhere there. So far, in 2015, the Khmeimim military air base was deployed next to the Syrian port of Latakia, north of Tartus based on the runway of the local civilian airfield. Khmeimim became the headquarters of the Russian operation in Syria, simultaneously providing air support and covering the permanent Russian squadron in the Mediterranean Sea, which is based in Tartus, where the fairway was deepened, new pixels, warehouses and launched a multilayer air defense system. In Tartus, two new diesel-electrical submarines of project 636.3 with potentially nuclear winged missiles of large-range “Caliber”, which were built on the Baltic states and were constantly based on the Taman Peninsula, are constantly based. Later it was decided to leave them in Tartus due to the fact that the Turks under the Montreo Convention did not allow submarines (unlike surface ships) to walk freely through the Black Sea Straits, but only for repair or from repairs.

In 2015, it was announced that the Russian military was sent to Syria exclusively to fight the Isishamist terrorists, and having solved the problem, they will quickly return home.

Putin several times since 2015 announced the defeat of terrorists and the beginning of the withdrawal of troops, but this was all only PR.

The base in Tartus continues to expand and, according to Sergei Shoigu, “is able to accept dozens of warships; All ships parking are equipped with life support systems, unloading areas, and a repair complex for maintenance and small repair of ships and ships. ” In September 2018, for the first time after the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the USSR, large-scale exercises of the Ocean Shield were held in the Mediterranean Sea. From different fleets, but for the most part, 26 ships and two submarines, 34 aircraft from the naval aviation of the Navy, as well as the Russian Air Force, which were transferred to Khmeimim and supported the fleet in imitation of military operations were collected.

The Russian Federation does not have capable shock aircraft carriers and, so that at least with what hope of success to resist the US fleet and their allies in NATO in the Mediterranean Sea, you need a covered multi -layer modern air defense system in the region. It was for, in fact, the Syrian campaign was launched - to expand the powerful base of the Navy in Tartus, and with it an equally powerful base of the VKS in Khmeimim. The Montreo Convention prohibits the passage through the Black Sea Straits of Airborne Carries. In wartime, all this can turn out to be unimportant, but the American shock aircraft carrier groups all do not need to go into the Black Sea basin and substitute for the blows of anti -ship missiles deployed in the Crimea.

To hit the Black Sea Fleet, for example, Americans will be able to directly from the eastern part of the Mediterranean Sea, which means that it is there that we must prepare them,

Developing the infrastructure and working out the deployment of a powerful grouping of sea and air forces. Islamists have nothing to do with it. Russian forces are concentrated on the Syrian coast in Tartus and in Khmeimim, where there are no Islamists, and Alavites loyal damask live. And they project our military power from Tartus and from Khmeimim primarily to the sea to the west, and not deep into the country, to the east.

Now the next step is taken - further south, to Sudan.

The base on the Red Sea coast is, in fact, not about Africa, but about the Indian Ocean, where there is an American strategic base on the island of Diego-Garcia,

There is a headquarters of the 5th fleet in Bahrain and the main regional air base in Qatar. The agreement on the base in Sudan says that nuclear warships can enter there, but this is more than the Admiral’s dream of the future, since there is only one nuclear surface in the Russian Federation: the project 1144 “Orlan” “Peter the Great”. He needs to be repaired and recently does not go anywhere, waiting for the time to repair and convert the same type of Admiral Nakhimov to take his place. The project for the construction of a series of nuclear super-sections “Leader” (smaller “eagles”, but almost equal in armament) was fucked up due to a lack of money. The destroyers in the Russian Federation have not been built from the beginning of the nineties, and the former went to China. We have no destroyers on the go at all, and if the new frigate is in service one per year, then this is considered a holiday.

From poverty, our frigates now play the role of independent ocean flagman ships.

There are quite a lot of new ships in the Russian Federation, but very small: small missile ships and all sorts of corvettes. Universal launchers are put on them, and they can shoot Caliber winged missiles, on which you can put nuclear warheads. But these babies have weak seaworthiness and air defense, short -lived autonomy of swimming and a small ammunition. In order to somehow resist the Americans in the open spaces of the Indian Ocean with this "mosquito fleet", of course, need a base in the region.

The Red Sea itself is a strategically important sea artery connecting Asia with Europe through the Suez Canal. Through the Red Sea, American warships and shock aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf and vice versa often follow. From the Red Sea water area, which, before the advent of the base in Sudan, was considered the Americans completely safe, they more than once bombed or struck winged missiles, say, targets in Syria. The Navy base in Sudan can change this alignment, but, like in Syria, you can get bogged down in local problems that are not related to the marine strategy and global confrontation. The current unstable, transitional (such as democracy) military-civilian Sudanese power with obscure prospects agreed to the Russian base with free rent. During the long civil war, Sudan has already broken up into the North and South, can continue to break up, and then what to do? In Syria, in order to save the base in Tartus and get Khmeimim (all in free long -term rental), I had to first save the perised regime of Bashar al -Assad, who now needs endless and gratuitous injections, in the supply of everything in the world. In Syria, hundreds of ours were killed or wounded, and no one really counted the Syrians. It is called: Free base.

Russia in the confrontation with the “main enemy” (USA) unfolds new bases or revives Soviet throughout the strategic perimeter. Not only where +45 ° C, but also where there is the same minus:

On the Chukotka and on the uninhabited islands of the earth of Franz Joseph, on the island of the boiler room, on the island of Wrangel, on the Matuas on the Kurils. Just as during the previous unbridled strategic expansion and rearmament in the seventies and eighties. Last time, as you know, the global Soviet bubble burst with a bang, leaving an unpleasant smell and piles of unnecessary iron in the most unexpected places.