Anyone curious to see what goes on behind the closed doors of Russia’s defence systems now needs to do no more than look online. Bloggers’ accounts show how easy it is to walk into army bases and publish sensitive images of military equipment for all to see.
Photos of a military base near Moscow went up [...]

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Russia has bucked a long-term trend of population decline by recording its first annual increase in 15 years, its health minister has announced.
The population grew in 2009 by between 15,000 and 25,000 to more than 141.9 million, Tatyana Golikova said, quoting preliminary figures.
Much of the growth is due to a falling death rate and increasing [...]

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Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has blamed the West for resorting to deceitful political measures to thwart the resetting of Moscow-Washington ties.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, most NATO member states have been unfair in their dealings with Russia, and have constantly broken their commitments, Putin told Kommersant daily in a Monday interview.
PressTV [...]

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A specially upgraded Russian Akula class submarine has been caught trying to record the acoustic signature made by the Vanguard submarines that carry Trident nuclear missiles, according to senior Navy officers.
British submariners have also reported that they are experiencing the highest number of “contacts” with Russian submarines since 1987.
Russian subs stalk Trident in echo [...]

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Israel is trying to prevent an arms deal between Russia and Syria, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has asked his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, to stop the arms sale involving advanced anti-shipping missiles.
The deal involves the sale of advanced P-800 Yakhont supersonic cruise missiles to the Syrian military. Israel considers this weaponry capable of posing [...]

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What made Bout unique was his ability to merge private profiteering with state interests in the new globalized world of unfettered weapons flows. Dubbed the “Merchant of Death,” Bout, often under the protection of his Russian superiors in the military intelligence structure, created a one-stop shop for weapons that could be delivered virtually anywhere in [...]

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Researchers in Russia’s exclave of Kaliningrad have recently found several items which support the theory that the famous Amber Room may still be buried under one of the city’s fortifications destroyed during World War II.
Experts believe that one of the main findings in subterranean vaults of the old bastions is a metal tablet with the [...]

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The poisonous smog that contributed to a higher death rate in Moscow last week returned to Russia’s capital Sunday, officials said.
The concentration of carbon monoxide in Moscow air early Sunday was more than five times what is considered normal, said Alexey Popikov of weather monitors Mosecomonitoring.
Poisonous smog returns to Moscow

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Over the past year the Kremlin’s biggest political headache hasn’t come from the anemic political opposition; it has come instead from a groundswell of resentment against Russia’s spectacularly corrupt, inept, and brutal police. A series of revelations of just how corrupt—from a police major’s YouTube video about the corruption of his colleagues, to the confessions [...]

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If these projections turn out to be relatively accurate—admittedly, a big “if” for any long-range demographic projection—the Russian Federation will have experienced over thirty years of continuous demographic decline by 2025, and the better part of four decades of depopulation by 2030. Russia’s population would then have dropped by about 20 million between 1990 and [...]

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