WASHINGTON, April 29 (UPI) -- Russia's foreign minister denied Wednesday that the Kremlin wants to boost its armed forces in the arctic or launch any arms race at the top of the world.
Russia is "not planning to increase our military presence in the arctic and to deploy armed forces there," Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov announced after attending a ministerial-level meeting of the Arctic Council in the Norwegian town of Tromso, RIA Novosti reported.
As we have reported in previous columns, top Russian policymakers have approved a far more forward and militarily active presence in the arctic region because global warming is expected to make huge energy and mineral deposits on the continental shelf and the floor of the Arctic Ocean accessible to modern drilling and mining techniques for the first time.
In March, the Russian Security Council published a policy paper titled "The Fundamentals of Russian State Policy in the Arctic up to 2020 and beyond" on its official Web site. The paper envisaged basing additional military, border-guard and coastal security forces in the arctic "to guarantee Russia's military security in diverse military and political circumstances." It also envisioned that these increased forces would come under a unified command to guard and advance Russian political and economic goals in the region.
Lavrov's comments were clearly meant for international consumption, but the RIA Novosti report acknowledged that he did not deliver them formally at the meeting, which would have raised the issue and left it open to responses from other countries. Instead, Lavrov spoke publicly to the media after the formal session.
The keynote speaker at the council was Nobel Peace Prize winner and former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, who concentrated on the issue of global climate change, RIA Novosti said.
The Arctic Council was set up in 1996 to maintain the ecology and lifestyles of the region and its peoples. Its members are Denmark, which governs Greenland and the Faroe Islands; Finland; Iceland; Canada; Norway; Russia; Sweden and the United States.
Russia is giving its senior military officers exams for competence, and those who don't get passing grades are being fired.
Russian Deputy Defense Minister Nikolai Pankov said Tuesday that at least 50 senior officers, including a number of generals, had failed the test and would be expelled from the military as a result, RIA Novosti reported.
"We are not going to keep officers who are not fit for their positions," Pankov said at a news conference. He said as many as 20 percent of all the officers who had taken the military competence exam had failed it.
"The Defense Ministry took a decision to carry out unplanned tests among officers and (non-commissioned officers). A considerable number of senior officers have proved inapt and will be dismissed from the armed forces," Pankov said.
Russian Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov, who is determined to impose new levels of efficiency and accountability on a streamlined Russian military, has decreed that the tests be mandatory. So far, 85 percent of all senior military officers have been tested, the report said.
In addition to the officers being fired, 133 more would be retained but moved to other, presumably less demanding, positions, the deputy defense minister said.
Serdyukov is pushing ahead with his hard-charging plans to slash total Russian military personnel numbers by 130,000 over the next seven years and to cap their total figure at 1 million, a number still far higher than that of any other European nation. Before the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991, the Soviet armed forces peaked at a colossal 4.5 million personnel, the report said.
Critics of the plan argue that as Russia is still the largest nation in the world, covering 11 time zones and with 300 ethnic minorities, it will still require more than 1 million personnel in its total armed forces to maintain security throughout its vast territories.
