Russia announced Monday that it is sending warships to patrol Arctic waters for the first time since the breakup of the Soviet Union — the latest move to increase the country’s global military presence.
Patrols by the Northern Fleet’s Severomorsk submarine destroyer and Marshal Ustinov missile cruiser will begin Thursday, Navy spokesman Igor Dygalo said.
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DEBKAfile’s military sources report that Israel has placed its military and air forces on its northern borders on high alert after Iran and Syria ignored Jerusalem’s warning, relayed to Washington, that the continued presence of Iranian, Syrian and Hizballah officers on the strategic Lebanese Sannine peak may spark a military clash.
Monday, July 14, two days [...]

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The private front companies, hidden on the outskirts of Teheran, are designed to operate undetected by the United Nations nuclear inspection teams. Concerns that nuclear weapon production will continue despite Iran’s proclamations of peaceful use only have circulated among Western experts.
One of the front companies will be located in Amir Abad, western Tehran, intelligence sources [...]

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In recent years, Moscow started to think that it could most easily express its dissatisfaction with Western politics by resorting to old Cold war cliches. The Kremlin does not like that Ukraine and Georgia want to join NATO, therefore it claimed that Western military bases will inevitably be built in those countries and that they [...]

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Gazprom is a busy beaver these days. First Libya, then Iran. This probably falls under the strategic unhelpfulness category.
From the article:
A few days after French oil giant Total withdrew from its planned multi-billion dollar gas investment project in Iran, Russia’s Gazprom is entering the market in a multi-billion-dollar deal.
Gazprom’s Chief Executive Alexei Miller met on [...]

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Russia’s military is ready to “neutralise” any threat to its nuclear deterrent from US missile defence sites in Europe, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Kislyak said Monday, according to Interfax news agency. “If we see the development of systems that could reduce our deterrent potential, our military will have to take steps to neutralise the threat,” [...]

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Greece has the same Russian S-300 ground-to-air radar systems as Iran. A June 2008 exercise with Israel may be preparation for strike.
While the Israeli-Greek air tactics were amply reported in the world’s media after initial reports in the New York Times, the pivotal information from Greece’s S-300 batteries has remained below the radar. By swarming [...]

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Vladimir Putin’s appointment this spring as prime minister of the symbolic “union” of Russia and Belarus was yet another example of the troubling similarities between today’s Russia and the other most stable and prosperous Russian regime of the past 80 years: Leonid Brezhnev’s Soviet Union in the 1970s. That economy, too, was fueled by then-record [...]

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