Manoj Ambat's Blog dealing with Defence, Foreign Affairs, Strategic Affairs and Politics

Image credits- VOA Source- Russia & India Report Author- Nilova Roy Chaudhury , RIR At the 45-minute long meeting with Vladimir Putin on Friday afternoon, his last official engagement before he left Tashkent, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi expressed gratitude and thanks to the Russian President for his support in getting India into the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO). India, along with Pakistan, was formally accepted as a new member at the Ufa summit of the SCO in July last year, when Russia was chairing the SCO. Having signed the Memorandum of Obligations, a mandatory requirement by which New Delhi accepted all the obligations by which the other member countries of the SCO abide, India is now a member. During the course of the year, before the next Summit in Astana, Kazakhstan, India (and Pakistan) will further sign around 30 more instruments of accession in various sectors of cooperation and attend the 2017 summit as full members. "India i

Indian Navy Mig-29K ( Image credits- Wikimedia Commons / Indian Navy) Source- Russia & India Report Author- Rakesh Krishna Simha Former Air Marshal Sumit Mukerji holds a rare distinction. The Indian Air Force officer, who was Air Officer Commanding-in-Chief, Southern Air Command, is the only air force pilot to have commanded MiG-21, MiG-23, MiG-25, MiG-27 and MiG-29 units. "The only pilot," he says. "There’s no one even in Russia.” Mukerji’s achievement was possible because of the dominance of MiG aircraft in the IAF fleet. Currently the IAF has 245 units of the MiG-21 interceptor and 120 units of the MiG-27 ground attack jet. The MiG-23 fighter-bomber and the MiG-25, of which the IAF had eight units of the reconnaissance version, are long retired. Although MiG-21s are still in use in as many as 19 air forces worldwide, the frequent crashes of these older IAF MiGs led to a trial by media and furore in parliament, after which the IAF announced

Image credits- Flickr / MEA India Official Source- Russia & India Report Author-  VIKTOR LITOVKIN ,   IZVESTIA The Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi has returned from the United States. Over the past two years, the Indian prime minister has visited the States four times, and has been called “a key partner in the field of defence”, which opens for New Delhi unlicensed access to a wide range of US dual-use technologies and will help to establish co-production of new weapons. Some media immediately made a categorical conclusion: “Russia’s strategic partner turns to the United States.” But does it? Of course not. The statements made by some analysts, that “Russia is losing the Indian market”, are nothing more than a manifestation of incompetence or, if you call a spade a spade, a means of unfair competition, as well as the continuation of an information war against our country. India is not a fidgety woman who turns in one direction and then in another

Sukhoi PAK-FA ( Image credits- Wikimedia Commons / Alex Beltyukov) Source- Russia & India Report Author- Rakesh Krishnan Simha With China having completed flight tests of its twin stealth fighters and commencing series production, India needs to show urgency in acquiring the PAK-FA stealth fighter. China’s J-20 jet has advanced to the eighth prototype and, after flight tests, is ready for regular production. The other stealth fighter, the comparatively smaller J-31, designed for export to customers such as Pakistan, is also ready to roll out. In its latest report to the US Congress, the US Department of Defence says these fifth-generation aircraft “could enter service as early as 2018” and warns that the new stealth jets could allow the People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) to dominate regional skies. The Pentagon report of May 2016, titled ‘Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China’, says: “China seeks to develop t

Image credits- DRDO Source- Russia & India Report Author- Nilova Roy Chaudhury , RIR India has become the 35th country to be admitted to the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR), a major international anti-proliferation group of which Russia is a key member. India’s admission did not have to wait for the formal plenary meeting of the MTCR due in Seoul, (Republic of Korea) later this year. The current Chair of the MTCR, The Netherlands, took the decision after no member country raised objections to India’s membership. According to sources in the Indian government, this will help India and Russia raise cooperation in space technology. It will also enable India and Russia to sell the supersonic ‘BrahMos’ missile, which has a range of 290 kilometres, to third countries. India and Russia co-produce the Brahmos, in a joint venture. Such a development would raise India’s profile as an arms exporter. The sale of the ‘BrahMos’ missile was among the topics whic

Image credits- Brahmos Source- Russia & India Report Author- TASS Work to develop a hypersonic version of the joint Russian-Indian BrahMos missile will begin around the year 2022, and a prototype is likely to be ready in 2024, TASS learned from Praveen Pathak, marketing director of the BrahMos Aerospace company. “This will be a completely different missile, with a flight speed of about Mach 6,” Pathak told TASS at the KADEX-2016 Exhibition. Over the next three to four years, the company is planning to “speed up” the current supersonic version to Mach 4, he said. Pathak said the preliminary design is now being developed. In Russia and India, they are simultaneously considering different options for the shape of the future missile. This stage, according to the BrahMos Aerospace representative, will require “at least five or six years” to complete, and then, roughly in 2022, the development work will begin, and two years hence – the first “iron” sample should app

Brahmos Missile ( Image credits- Wikimedia Commons / Author- Anirvan Shukla) Source- Russia & India Report Author- TASS India and Russia have agreed 'in principle' to export the world's fastest anti-ship cruise missile, BrahMos, to third countries - the UAE, Vietnam, South Africa and Chile, Praveen Pathak, spokesman for BrahMos Aerospace - the developer of the missile, told TASS on Friday. "The several structural changes were made in the defence exports policy and these were yielding results. As far as the BrahMos missile is concerned, talks with countries like UAE, Chile, South Africa and Vietnam are in advanced stages," he said. "Since Russia is the partner country in the BrahMos joint venture with its consent discussions with several other countries, including Philippines, South Korea, Algeria, Greece, Malaysia, Thailand, Egypt, Singapore, Venezuela and Bulgaria have now been taken to the next level," he said. пустым не о

Image credits- ISRO Source- Russia & India Report Author-  Yuri Karash , Vzglyad A couple of decades ago, the assumption that India was capable of claiming a part of the launch services market would have appeared too bold. Launch services had been securely divided between the US, Russia and Europe. At that time, India was only "learning" to fly into space, building sub-orbital vehicles, and light-class carriers that could deliver a few dozen kilograms of load to a low Earth orbit. The technology is not for everyone The situation changed in the early 1990s. India then developed and commissioned the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV), a middle class launch vehicle, which has performed 35 test flights to date, of which all but one have been successful and one has been partly successful., making the PSLV’s reliability rating almost 95%, placing it on par with the best Russian, US and European carriers. The most major achievement of the Indian spa

Indira series of joint Indo-Russian exercises ( Image credits- Wikimedia Coomons / Mil.ru) Source- Russia & India Report / TASS A second round of consultations on planning the Russian-Indian war games Indra-2016 will be held in India in June, Col Alexander Gordeyev, the chief press officer of Russia's Eastern Military District said on Tuesday. "At the second planning conference that will be held in India, representatives of the Eastern Military District and the Indian Armed Forces will coordinate a calendar of the war games, the types and quantities of weapons and the procedure for the handover of arms, equipment and specialized technologies to the Indian army servicemen who will take part in the maneuvers," he said. Avia Indra-2014 teaches pilots tactics and precision The Russian-Indian anti-terrorist exercise Indra-2016 will take place in the second half of 2016 on the Sergeyevsky training ground located in the Far-Eastern Primorsky (Maritime)

IAF Mil MI-17 ( Image credits- Wikimedia Commons / United States Army) Source- Russia & India Report Author- Rakesh Krishnan Simha To understand how vulnerable helicopters are to shoulder fired missiles, click here to see the devastating impact of a Russian Strela 2M on a US-made Cobra of the Turkish military. It takes the Kurdish missile team about 15 seconds to achieve visual target acquisition, after which it takes the missile less than five seconds to smash into the target. The Strela-2M has a range of 4200 metres, which comes close to the AgustaWestland AW101 helicopter’s maximum flight ceiling of 4500 metres. In comparison, the Russian Mi-17V5 helicopter has a service ceiling of 6000 metres. Given the vulnerability of relatively slow and low flying helicopters to shoulder fired missiles, India’s governing elites should have picked the more survivable Mi-17 as their transport helicopter with their eyes closed. India has acquired 151 Mi-17s for transport