YOU READ TAPPED, YOU KNOW THESE THINGS....

YOU READ TAPPED, YOU KNOW THESE THINGS.... As a brief update to this post, a new article in Kommersant (a Russian online daily) further details the problems that are developing in the Sino-Russian military relationship. Russia won't sell its niftiest new weapons, and China doesn't need to buy the same old stuff anymore:

"The Russian military-industrial complex mainly supplied China with arms developed in Soviet times," Andrey Karneev, deputy director of the Institute of the Countries of Asia and Africa, told Kommersant. "Now that reserve has been exhausted. The Chinese want to receive more modern systems from Russia. But Russia won't include missile technology in the sphere of cooperation for understandable reasons." Alexander Lukin, director of the Center for Asiatic Studies at the Moscow State Institute of Foreign Relations explained that "We have already armed China more than once. In the 1960s, those weapons were used against our border forces. That does not mean that nothing of the kind will happen again, but there remains a certain caution in relations with China, and so Russia doesn't want to sell it its newest weapons."

For their part, the Russians have also expanded their arms export market extensively, and aren't as dependent on the Chinese as they were a few years ago.

--Robert Farley