The Bug Pit
Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili has offered to send more troops to Afghanistan, on top of the 950 or so soldiers that are already there. Reports Civil.ge:
Russia has been warning Tajikistan that the U.S. wants to overthrow President Emomali Rakhmon for the sake of eliminating Russian influence in the country and creating "a string of anti-Russia military bases from Baghram to Manas." That's according to a U.S. State Department cable just released by WikiLeaks. It recounts a conversation with then-U.S.
Given the pushback that Turkey has been giving to NATO missile defense plans, some Republican U.S. senators have come up with an alternate location for a missile defense site: Georgia.
Late in 2007 Uzbekistan customs officials intercepted a rail car carrying some radioactive material, most likely either cesium or uranium, en route from Kyrgyzstan to Iran. That bit of tantalizing information comes courtesy of WikiLeaks, which has released several U.S. State Department cables about the incident. Unfortunately, the cables don't shed light on the most important questions: who was sending it, who was receiving it, and what were they going to do with it
Over the past couple of years Russia has announced a major overhaul of the vessels in its Black Sea Fleet, and secured long-term basing rights to keep the fleet in Sevastopol, on Ukraine's Crimean coast.
When Azerbaijan passed a law last year that would, for the first time, allow foreign military bases on its soil, the leading candidates seemed to be Russia, Turkey and the U.S. And even those seemed unlikely, given little obvious reason any of them would want a base in Azerbaijan.
So, Uzbekistan President Islam Karimov has finished his trip to Brussels, where the New York Times reported that he got the "red-carpet treatment." So what was discussed? We may never know what actually happened behind closed doors, but there are some interesting discrepancies between the official statements of the two sides, Tashkent and Brussels (in particular, NATO).
Last month, Turkey announced that it was going to build an indigenous fighter jet by 2023, which raised the question: what's the point, given that it's already building fighter jets with the U.S., including the current F-16 and the next-generation F-35?
Russia is deploying its Tochka-U/SS-21/Scarab B short-range tactical missile in South Ossetia, reports Interfax quoting unnamed Russian military sources. The Tochka has a range of up to 120 km and around 15 of them were used against Georgia in the 2008 war.