Russia Defense Watch: Melting ice menace

MOSCOW, June 23 (UPI) -- Global warming could deal destructive blows to Russia's defense infrastructure over the next 22 years, a top official said in Moscow last week.

Defense infrastructure, including key airfields, oil storage facilities and strategic oil reservoirs, could all be destroyed if the hard permafrost covering the ground year-round across Russia's far north melts by 2030, Russia's First Deputy Emergencies Minister Ruslan Tsalikov told the Federation Council, the upper chamber of the Russian parliament, Thursday.

Tsalikov described as a catastrophe the damage that would result from widespread permafrost melting, the RIA Novosti news agency reported.

Russia's widespread coniferous forests also could be inundated by flooding and unprecedented warmer weather triggered by climate change, Tsalikov said.

"If the annual temperature rises by one or two degrees ... the permafrost could decrease 50 percent," Tsalikov said. The "risk of flooding would also double," he said, according to the RIA Novosti report.

Global warming could also cost Russia its huge supplies of methane gas trapped beneath the permafrost, believed to be almost one third of the entire world's reserves, RIA Novosti said.

The news agency said West Siberia's permafrost was currently disappearing at the rate of 4 centimeters per year. That would cause the permafrost's southern boundaries to retreat by an average of nearly 50 miles across northern Russia over the next 20 years, the report said.

Across the Arctic, levels of sea ice have shrunk by nearly 50 percent from 7.2 million square kilometers in 1979 to 4.3 million square kilometers in 2007, RIA Novosti said.

Tsalikov's warnings mark a significant reversal from previous Russian complacency on the global warming issue. Russian scientists and top officials have readily acknowledged the reality of global warming for years, but they often described it as a welcome process because it freed up for human exploitation and habitation enormous areas of land and Arctic Ocean floor resources that previously have been inaccessible.

Russia also announced it is revising its strategy to concentrate more military resources in the far north to establish and enforce its claims to the vast reserves of oil, gas and other natural resources that it expects will be discovered in the Arctic.

However, Tsalikov's comments reveal that Russian officials now recognize the process will not be cost-free and likely will involve catastrophic damage to existing military assets and infrastructure on an enormous scale.

The head of the Indian army is paying a five-day visit to Russia in another sign of continuing close strategic relations between the two nations.

Indian Army Chief Gen. Deepak Kapoor is scheduled to arrive in Russia Monday and meet top Russian defense officials and senor officers. He will visit St. Petersburg and the Caucasus military district as well as Moscow, the RIA Novosti news agency reported Thursday.

RIA Novosti said the purpose of the trip was "to discuss strengthening military ties."

Kapoor's scheduled visit to the North Caucasus region suggests discussions and increased cooperation on counterinsurgency tactics and strategy may be an important element in his visit. After a long, uphill struggle involving many hundreds of Russian civilian victims of major terrorist attacks and scores of thousands of Chechen casualties, Russia appears to have effectively defeated the long-running Chechen secessionist movement in the North Caucasus.

India continues to guard against mujahedin guerrilla attacks across the Line of Control in Kashmir and a serious and escalating Maoist Naxalite guerrilla movement in north-central India.

Significantly, RIA Novosti noted the last time a senior Indian general visited Russia, it was also to focus on issues of counterinsurgency. In September 2007, an Indian senior general participated in the INDRA-2007 joint counter-terrorism exercise in Russia's northwest Pskov region, the news agency said.

Russian officials said last week they had boosted security on their military forces guarding railway lines in the secessionist region of Abkhazia in the Caucasus after two explosions in the Abkhaz capital, Sukhumi, the RIA Novosti news agency reported Wednesday.

Abkhazia is a Russian-supported secessionist region within the former Soviet republic of Georgia. The pro-Western Georgian government of President Mikheil Saakashvili wants to join NATO, a development that the Kremlin strongly opposes.

There were no casualties in the two explosions on a railway station platform in the suburbs of Sukhumi, a Russian military official said.

"Our troops were not hurt in the explosions," he said, according to the RIA Novosti report. "The security of our railway troops has been tightened."

The Russian government announced May 31 that it was sending 300 railroad troops to Abkhazia to fix broken tracks. As previously reported in Russia Defense Watch, President Saakashvili's government protested the move and said it was a preparatory step to Russian armed intervention on behalf of the Abkhazians.