Russia has staged its first large-scale military parade since the collapse of the Soviet Union in a show of the nation's revived military might.
The parade was held in Moscow's Red Square on Friday to mark the anniversary of victory over Nazi Germany in World War Two.
The hour-long event featured 8,000 marching troops and 110 military vehicles and other hardware, including advanced tanks and the latest Topol nuclear-capable intercontinental missile. 32 combat aircraft were also displayed.
A war veteran watching the event said he had been dreaming about the day.
Standing on a platform with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, new president Dmitry Medvedev declared that Russia's armed forces have recovered their full strength.
In the 8 years under Putin's administration, the nation's defense spending grew more than 5-fold, in line with his policy of reviving a strong Russia.
2008/05/09 19:50
http://www.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/09_35.html
needs moar Bullwinkle balloon
"advanced tanks" lol T-90s are shit.
Even the Chinese have better tanks than the Russians now.
This is probably not political, strictly speaking, but the T90 is not a bad design, even by 21st Century standards. However I do not think it has ever been used in combat, and contemporary Western designs have shown themselves to be quite formidable, at least in comparison to the older Soviet and ChiCom stuff that is most common around the world.
A more interesting question, though, is how many relatively advanced MBTs the Russians currently possess. Even if we declare this term to mean, for the sake of this discussion, T80s and later, how much really modern stuff do they actually have?
I recall reading estimates in the late 1980s (yes, I'm not only an old fart but also an old fart wargamer) that while the Soviets had a thousand or so T80s in East Germany, around 85% of their tanks were T54, T55, or T62 models, which are so old that if they were cars they'd have tailfins. Since 1991 I do not imagine that the Russians have been building a lot of new hardware and whatever bombast they're shouting at their military parades, they are not in a position to run their entire economy on a total war footing the way the USSR did. They don't have the resources, they don't have the hundreds of thousands of Ukranian and Lithuanian and Chechen conscripts to put up at the front lines, and I should think that more than fifteen years of open relations with the West have demonstrated even to the craziest former nomenklatura men that the rest of the world is not plotting night and day to invade them, so they have no real justification to pour that much of their economy down that particular bottomless rathole anyway.
The ChiComs are another matter, of course, but I would note that, first, they are buying T80s and T90s from the Russians, as well as other fairly advanced weapons systems, but, on the other hand, the PLA is still very much the light-infantry army it was in 1950, with only small numbers of AFVs. And the vast bulk of tanks they have are T59 and T69s, copies of fifty-year-old Soviet tanks which have been demonstrated to be not even speed bumps for a modern Western army.
soooooooooooooo cool
all Suchois are so beautiful.
I think what bothers Russia the most is the Soviet Union pretty much armed all of America's enemies (including some friends like India) with tons of their military equipment and everytime the US comes up against it, it kicks its ass and anyone who is driving it.
America clearly has the military edge. But the Russians still have more nukes and subs, but no money to run any of it.