President Vladimir Putin continues to support the creation of a modernized and combat-capable military by 2020. A significant element in such military modernization is the Navy, which also protects Russia’s interests in strategic areas from the Arctic to the Pacific Ocean; after more than two decades, the political leadership wants to seriously invest in a long-overdue naval modernization. Moscow is also increasingly turning its attention to the Asia-Pacific Region, and military manifestations of this policy appear in the building of military infrastructure in the Russian Far East and focusing naval modernization on the Pacific Fleet.
Russian experts and commentators are increasingly turning to consider precisely what type of Navy the country requires and whether these visions of its future match present political and economic rearmament plans. These themes also feature in the thinking of the General Staff. But these views and the likely trajectory of Russian naval development in the coming decades need to be defragmented from the high-profile reporting on increased activity in the Mediterranean Sea, including access to Cypriot ports for emergency use, to expose the harsh reality facing the Navy.
Konstantin Sivkov turned to such considerations as whether a quite limited naval capability is sufficient to solve the problem of ensuring military security. In Voyenno Promyshlennyy Kuryer, Sivkov interviewed Admiral (retired) Vladimir Komoyedov, the head of the Duma defense committee and former commander of the Black Sea Fleet. The interview itself contains little out of the ordinary, but it exposes some of the underlying issues concerning the reliability of current naval development plans: Do these plans correspond to the threat environment? If implemented, will naval modernization plans meet the needs of the country?
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