The Abortive Mistral Deal Works out for Russia

This about *default, tagged , was written by for on September 23, 2015

alligatorsEgypt rubs in the salt in Hollande’s wounds by ordering 50 Alligator helicopters from Russia to outfit the Mistrals, which France is now going to sell to Egypt.

So to sum up this whole sorry affair:

(1) Russia originally ordered French Mistrals under Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov. His foreign aquisitions were ostensibly aimed to pressure Russian producers to lower costs, but more cynical observers suspected it may have had more to do with foreign arms manufacturers providing kickbacks to him and his female posse which had effectively seized the Defense Ministry under the Medvedev Presidency.

(2) Rumors which gained credence when he was dismissed for corruption on a scale that raised eyebrows even in a country as corrupt as Russia.

(3) After about a year of delays following those little triffling incidents in Crimea and the Donbass, France made a definitive decision, under US pressure, to avoid selling the Mistrals to Russia, making it liable for about $1 billion worth of fines. (To his credit, Hollande’s government accepted the legitimacy of these penalties, so as to avoid completely discrediting France’s commercial reputation in the international arms market). As an added bonus, Russia got most of the technical blueprints on the Mistral anyway (saving $$$ in R&D costs).

(4) Now Russia, or at least Kamov, is receiving a further $1 billion in orders.

Ironically enough, what began as a very expensive and questionable way of pressuring Russian arms manufacturers at best, and yet another of Serdyukov’s corruption schemes at worst, actually ended up working out quite nicely for Russia. France got cucked by hamburger, Russia got out ahead.

Comments

  1. Whyvert says
    September 23, 2015 at 11:38 pm

    Um, what the hell do the Egyptians need such a vessel for? Must suspect that the French bribed Egypt to relieve them of this embarrassment.

  2. TenD says
    September 24, 2015 at 12:10 am

    Hamburger?

  3. Bob Arctor says
    September 24, 2015 at 1:20 am

    “Hamburger” = United States.

  4. Mitleser says
    September 24, 2015 at 3:37 am

    Haven’t you heard that Saudi-Arabia is working on an Arabian alliance?
    Egypt is one of the main contributors.

  5. Sean says
    September 24, 2015 at 6:37 am

    Germany’s triumph: from the ruins of war For much of the past 500 years, the fear was not that Germany itself would disturb the European balance of power but that an outside force would use the Germans to do so. This was because their political commonwealth, the “Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation”, was bitterly divided, between the emperor and the leading princes, and between Catholics and Protestants. This created a vacuum at the heart of Europe which exported instability and attracted the predatory attention of its neighbours, most catastrophically during the Thirty Years War (1618-48), but also during the Turkish invasions of central Europe and the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars.[…]

    France and Sweden were guarantor powers from the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, with the right to intervene in German affairs to keep the peace or to prevent foreign interference, and in the 18th century Russia was also formally awarded that privilege. The German Confederation of 1815, the successor to the empire, was constructed on very similar lines in order to ensure that Germany did not lapse into civil war and that it remained strong enough to repel invaders, but never became so strong as to pose a threat to its neighbours.[…]

    The result was a German political culture preoccupied with precedence, legality, rules and procedure to the point of paralysis. Two of the American founding fathers, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, diagnosed this condition more than 200 years ago. They looked at the “federal system” of the “Germanic empire” and found it to be “a nerveless body, incapable of regulating its own members, insecure against external dangers, and agitated with unceasing fermentations in its own bowels”. […]

    In the 17th and 18th centuries, the Germans played by the rules but nobody else did. After a long agony, the Holy Roman empire collapsed under the onslaught of revolutionary France and Napoleon. Later, the German Confederation, which failed to deter French revanchism, was destroyed by Bismarck in his drive to create a united Germany in 1871. This turned the Germans from objects of the state system into ­subjects, with a powerful voice in Europe and the world

    Germany the day before yesterday, Arabs the day after tomorrow

  6. Sean says
    September 24, 2015 at 7:37 am

    It is disappointing that Russian military technology is boring now .

    http://www.wired.com/2011/06/ekranoplan/ In the mid-1960s, when CIA analysts first saw satellite images of the KM, they knew only that something very large and very fast had appeared on the Caspian Sea. The bewildered analysts dubbed it the “Caspian Sea Monster.”

    […] . At 295 feet long, capable of flying with a total weight of 600 tons and operating at a cruising speed of 310 miles per hour, it was hardly a mock-up. At a glance the KM looks like it was made to fight Godzilla.

    Insead of looking to France for a ship, I would like them to have built a humongous Ekranoplan

  7. Seamus Padraig says
    September 24, 2015 at 9:57 am

    Russia originally ordered French Mistrals under Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov. His foreign aquisitions were ostensibly aimed to pressure Russian producers to lower costs, but more cynical observers suspected it may have had more to do with foreign arms manufacturers providing kickbacks to him and his female posse which had effectively seized the Defense Ministry under the Medvedev Presidency.

    Anatoly, I heard a different theory from the Saker a while back. He claimed that the Mistral deal was basically a gift to Sarkozy for helping to broker an end to the Georgian War in 2008 without blaming Russia. Saker emphasized that Russia had the technology to build these boats on their own, so he saw it as a reward to France.

  8. 5371 says
    September 24, 2015 at 1:36 pm

    Since the death of king Abdullah Saudi-Egyptian relations have become significantly cooler.

  9. Seamus Padraig says
    September 24, 2015 at 2:10 pm

    Since the death of king Abdullah Saudi-Egyptian relations have become significantly cooler.

    It looks like Gen. Sisi is taking Egypt in a pro-Russian direction, reversing the work of Sadat.

  10. Anatoly Karlin says
    September 24, 2015 at 6:03 pm

    Maybe, maybe not. I don’t know if The Saker has sources or is merely speculating.

    But $2 billion is an awfully expensive gift for not really doing that big of a favor anyway.

  11. Andrei Martyanov says
    September 24, 2015 at 7:47 pm

    It was a “package” deal.