MOSCOW — On July 7, Russia's most respected independent newspaper, Kommersant, published a remarkable full-page interview with the chief designer of Russia's strategic missiles, Yuri Solomonov. Ostensibly about defense budgeting and the state of the Russian strategic arsenal, the interview was actually a stinging attack on President Dmitry Medvedev's leadership in one of Russia's most politically and internationally fraught arenas: strategic nuclear weapons. The Russian commander in chief emerged from Solomonov's portrait as a bad strategic planner, an inept manager, and a Khrushchev-like shoe-banging blusterer who is making Russia's already weakened position in global politics even more perilous.
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A rare public insight into Kremlin decision-making in an especially secretive area, the interview was even more interesting as the first public, honest answer to Russian officialdom's question of questions: Whose side are you on in advance of next year's "elections," the Regent prime minister or the Dauphin president?
Solomonov began by describing the technological base of the Russian missile
industry with a degree of frankness not heard from a Russian in a position of
authority since the halcyon days of glasnost. Russia, he said, is utterly
dependent on imports from the West because there are technologies that it
"cannot make itself." We "simply don't have anything," Solomonov told
Kommersant. (According to Solomonov,
the share of high-tech in Russia's total exports is one-fourth of 1 percent.)
One ought not be surprised that Russia is "looked down" on, he continued;
for the West, Russia is just a "territory with a lot of nuclear weapons."
China,
which he called the "world's second economy," has only between 200 and 250
missiles. The same goes for France and Britain, whose "economies cannot be
compared to ours" but which, too, don't have anything on the level of Russia's
arsenal. In this context, Solomonov continued, haggling with the United States
over the exact numbers of permitted strategic missiles is plain ridiculous -- a
"psychological" itch and a "short-term political game" rather than a
national security imperative. Thus, Medvedev's crowning foreign-policy
achievement, the New START missile reduction treaty, is hardly a triumph. According to Solomonov,
Moscow could have, and should have, gone below the 1,550 New START minimum at
least to 1,200 or even 1,000 strategic warheads.
Medvedev
is not simply allowing a bad situation to continue, Solomonov averred, he's making things worse. The 2010 defense
procurement order has fallen through, and Medvedev only now, "half a year
later," got around to holding a meeting with government officials and industry
figures to look into what happened. Small wonder then, that, according to Solomonov,
the 2011 defense plan is also a failure: The defense industry cannot possibly
fulfill it.
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