World Naval Developments

Russia Shops Around

What might once have seemed a fantasy now seems more realistic. A year ago senior Russian visitors to the Euronaval show in Paris expressed interest in the French Mistral class amphibious carrier. A spokesman said that it was "not excluded" that the Russians might buy a foreign-built ship for their fleet. That seemed to be blather; surely a country that had been designing and building its own warships for decades had no great need to buy a relatively simple warship from another nation. The last time the Russians bought foreign-built ships was before World War II. At the end of the war the Russians also made considerable use of new German submarine technology (as did Western navies), but that was a special case.