Routing Iran oil payments on PM’s Moscow agenda

Routing Iran oil payments on PM’s Moscow agenda

NEW DELHI: With Turkey refusing to be intermediary for Indian oil payments to Iran, New Delhi is expected to start talks with Moscow about routing payments through Russian banks.

Energy and defence is high on the agenda as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh makes his annual summit visit at a time when Russian president Dmitry Medvedev is preparing to hand back power to Vladimir Putin early next year. Singh's visit also coincides with Russia formally joining the WTO.

Reports said Turkish bank Halkbank had refused to open an account for Indian oil company BPCL to pay for Iranian oil. The move comes after the US and the EU prepare to slap new sanctions against Iran's oil sector and seeks to penalize countries who deal with Iran's central bank. While Turkish government sources clarified that Turkey did not act on unilateral sanctions by countries, banks and other entities were free to take independent decisions.

Russia, which is one of the two Iran's strongest supporters, may be approached by India to pitch in as an intermediary. This is expected to feature in the talks in Moscow. Briefing journalists before the visit, foreign secretary Ranjan Mathai said Iran was crucial to India's energy security. "The importance we attach to our energy security, the fact that a very large amount of India's oil imports do emanate from Iran and in fact that in the current energy market it is not easy to consider that India can sort of manage without Iranian oil. Iranian oil is very important to India. So, I think that continues to be a very important issue for us. That is why we had sought the mechanisms for payments so that we continue our trade with Iran."

Before his departure, the PM said, in a statement, "I look forward to an in-depth exchange of views with the Russian leadership on the crisis facing the global economy and the political developments in our extended neighbourhood, including West Asia, the Gulf and Afghanistan and the impact of all this on peace and stability in the world."

Calling it a "special and privileged" partnership, the PM told a group of Russian journalists that there is an effort to inject new ideas into an old relationship, like "such as exploring the possibility of creating a joint investment fund, studying a possible Comprehensive Economic Cooperation Agreement with the broader Eurasian region, encouraging greater connectivity through the North South Transport Corridor, and linking Indian States with Russian regions."

Russia is refusing to bring Kudankulam 3 and 4 reactors under a new agreement that will be governed by the Indian nuclear liability law. Until now, Russia had maintained the primacy of the inter-governmental agreement nuclear negotiations with India. Mathai gently refuted that by describing the agreement as a "broad roadmap". Refusing to acknowledge the differences with Russia, the FS, however, said, "(Kudankulam) 1 and 2 came up in a particular timeframe. Now there is an existing law. So, the expert committees will look at it and then come to a conclusion."

With PM in Moscow, India likely to get Russian nuclear submarine by year-end

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/India-likely-to-get-Russian-nuclear-submarine-by-year-end/articleshow/11125531.cms
TNN | Dec 16, 2011, 01.29AM IST

NEW DELHI: India will finally get to operate INS Chakra, the rechristened Akula-II class nuclear-powered submarine 'K-152 Nerpa' being leased from Russia for 10 years, in the new year.

With PM Manmohan Singh now in Moscow, sources said India would in all probability get the Nerpa around end-December. Over 50 Indian officers and sailors have undergone extensive training on the Nerpa, followed by testing and acceptance trials of the submarine spread over several weeks, as was earlier reported by TOI.

The submarine will not complete India's "nuclear triad'' since it will not be armed with long-range nuclear-tipped missiles due to international treaties like the Missile Technology Control Regime.

But it will help train Indian sailors in the complex art of operating nuclear submarines, which will be useful when India's own nuclear submarine, the over 6,000-tonne INS Arihant, becomes operational next year. Armed with torpedoes and 300-km Klub-S cruise missiles, Nerpa will also be a lethal hunter of enemy submarines and warships.

The 10-year lease flows from an agreement inked between India and Russia in January 2004, with New Delhi funding part of Nerpa's construction at Komsomolsk-on-Amur shipyard with an initial $650 million. It was slated for induction much earlier but technical glitches delayed the process, which included a toxic gas leak in November 2008 that killed 20 Russian sailors.

Incidentally, the 'Charlie-I' class nuclear submarine India had leased from Russia from 1988 to 1991 was also named INS Chakra but the expertise gained on it was steadily lost since Indian Navy did not operate any other nuclear submarine thereafter.

Russian-built, BrahMos-fitted frigate set for Indian Navy induction

IANS

Friday, 16 December 2011

MOSCOW: Equipped with BrahMos supersonic cruise missiles, INS Teg, a Russian-built frigate for the Indian Navy, will set sail once its Indian crew arrives and takes over the warship from the Russian Navy, well-informed sources said here on Friday.
INS Teg is the first of six Talwar (Krivak) class frigates to be equipped with the 290-km BrahMos missiles jointly developed by India and Russia. The first three Talwar class warships -- INS Talwar, INS Trishul and INS Tabar -- that were inducted in the Indian Navy in 2002 and 2003 do not have the BrahMos, but are equipped with Klub class missiles.
Apart from INS Teg, two other frigates, being built by the Kaliningrad-based Yantar shipyard -- all three constituting the second line of Talwar-class ships -- will also have the BrahMos missiles integrated. "With the successful test of BrahMos, INS Teg is now ready to sail to India. It is awaiting its Indian Navy crew, who are expected later this month or early in January 2012," sources here told IANS.
"The Indian Navy plans to induct the warship by March 2012," they added. The Russian Navy, which had conducted the sea trials of INS Teg in September, test-fired the BrahMos from the ship's bow in the first week of December. Telemetric data indicated that all of its systems performed optimally, the sources said. India and Russia had in July 2007 signed a $1.6 billion contract for the three follow-on Talwar class frigates under the Indian Navy's Project 11356. 
INS Teg and the other two warships -- INS Tarkash (delivery likely in July 2012) and INS Trikand (January 2013) are expected to bolster the Indian Navy's growing blue water capabilities and ambitions. The Indian Navy giving top priority to these guided missile frigates to maintain its combat worthiness and organizational ability to deploy warships at immediate notice.
The previous vessels of the Talwar class have been deployed by Indian Navy in

anti-piracy operations in the Gulf of Aden and have proved themselves worthy of being mean fighting machines by achieving "kills" of pirate mother ships.Packed with sensors, weapons and missile systems and stealth due to highly-reduced radar, infra-red, noise, frequency and magnetic signatures to beat enemy detection, each of these warships is equipped with a 100-mm gun, a Shtil air defence system, two Kashtan air defence gun and missile systems, two twin 533-mm torpedo tubes, and an anti-submarine warfare helicopter.

BrahMos Aerospace is an India-Russia joint venture established in 1998 for the joint development of the eponymously-named supersonic cruise missiles. The missiles, said to be the fastest in their class, are now under production and have been successfully inducted into the Indian Army and Indian Navy. The two countries are also developing the air-launched version of the missile that can cruise at speed of Mach 3, or three times the speed of sound, for the Indian Air Force's Sukhoi S-30 MKI air superiority combat planes. A hypersonic version of BrahMos with Mach 7 speeds to boost aerial strike capability is under development and is expected to be ready by 2016.

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