Echo of the Cold War as Russia anchors in Caribbean

Published on Monday 22 September 2008 22:48

RUSSIAN warships set sail yesterday for manoeuvres in the Caribbean, in a deployment of military power to the western hemisphere unprecedented since the Cold War.

The exercise, drawing on a strong alliance with Venezuela's anti-American president, Hugo Chavez, will be closely watched by western navies and is calculated to demonstrate to the United States Moscow's return as a global power on the military and political stage.

Igor Dygalo, a spokesman for the Russian navy, said that the nuclear-powered heavy missile cruiser Peter the Great and antisubmarine destroyer Admiral Chabanenko left their base near Murmansk with two support ships for the 15,000-mile passage to Venezuela.

The Kremlin has moved to intensify contacts with Venezuela, Cuba and other Latin American nations, amid increasingly strained relations with Washington after last month's war between Russia and Georgia.

Mr Dygalo refused to comment on reports claiming that the ships were to make a stopover in the Syrian port of Tartus on their way to Venezuela. Russian officials said the Soviet-era base there was being renovated to serve as a foothold for a permanent Russian navy presence in the Mediterranean.

The deployment follows a weeklong visit to Venezuela by a pair of Russian strategic bombers and comes as Mr Chavez – an unbridled critic of US foreign policy who has close ties with Moscow – plans to visit Moscow this week.

It will be his second trip to Russia in about two months.

The intensifying contacts with Venezuela appear to be a response to the US dispatch of warships to deliver aid to Georgia, which angered the Kremlin. An independent military analyst, Alexander Golts, said: "It's a show of the Kremlin's irritation about the US deployment to Georgia."

He added: "It's a signal to the United States: you have broken into our zone of influence, and we will show you that we can enter yours."

BACKGROUND

RUSSIA'S cultivation of the leftist Hugo Chavez and renewed interest in Cuba bear unmistakable echoes of the Cold War, when two superpowers vied for influence.

At that time, Latin America became an ideological battleground between the Soviet Union and the United States, reaching a climax with the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 in which the two superpowers went to the brink of nuclear war.

In the years after the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia's once-proud armed forces, deprived of funding, declined rapidly. Ships lacked fuel to put to sea, warplanes were grounded, troops neglected.

Eventually, with the revival of the national economy and soaring oil revenues, the Kremlin leaders poured money into the armed forces, as a symbol of revived national prowess, though western analysts say their fleet is still in great need of modernisation.