Russian President Vladimir Putin spent much of his state-of-the-nation speech on Thursday talking about nuclear weapons. With a clear message to the United States, he especially highlighted new missiles that would be immune to possible missile defence shields. What got much less attention, was a small sentence in a larger interview with Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin published by newspaper Kommersant this week. Rogozin, who was Russia’s ambassador to NATO in Brussels until December 2011, talks in the interview about his first days at work as Deputy Prime Minister in charge of defence industry. “The presidential decree on appointment was issued on December 23,” Dmitry Rogozin says when explaining why he will remember the first days in new position for the rest of his life: “a fire on board the ballistic missile submarine “Ekaterinburg” in the dock of the shipyard in Roslyakovo.”
Barents Observer 1st March 2018 read more »