The CSTO gives higher priority to the trainings of the Collective Rapid Reaction Forces (KSOR) in Armenia in 2012. This was declared during the press-conference in Yerevan by the Vice General Secretary of the Organization Valery Semerikov. READ MORE

Minister of Economy and Stable Development of Georgia Vera Kobalia considers economic relations of Lithuania and Georgia to be insufficient. She thinks that more can be expected, and that the main problems rest within the sphere of goods transportation and absence of direct communication between the two states. During an interview for DELFI she underlined that due to the embargo imposed by Russia in 2006 on Georgian goods, her country has only benefited, and entrance of Russia into WTO shall positively influence Georgian economy. In course of her visit to Vilnius the youngest minister in the team of Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili Vera Kobalia answered the questions of DELFI, shared with her view on economic cooperation between Lithuania and Georgia, main problems and project of Georgian economy, talked about the opinion of Tbilisi on entrance of Russia into WTO and on the Customs Union of Russia, Kazakhstan and Belarus.
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The day before the Thanksgiving holiday brought three extraordinary news items. One was the report on the Republican presidential campaign debate. One was the Russian President's statement about his country's response to Washington's missile bases surrounding his country. And one was the failure of a German government bond auction. READ MORE

As Russia begins to spend $650 billion to modernize their armed forces (by the end of the decade), the prime minister also ordered a dramatic step to permanently cut the Russian military loose from their Cold War past. This requires scrapping over 10 million tons of obsolete weapons (including over 20,000 tanks, over 100,000 other armored vehicles and artillery, hundreds of ships and thousands of aircraft). During the 1990s, this stuff was just left to rot in open fields, remote airbases and dingy corners of ports and naval bases. In the last decade, Russia has spent over half a billion dollars providing some security, and minimal upkeep for this stuff. For a long time, there was the hope that the abandoned weapons might be useful if there was another major war. But there's no one to operate the stuff, as the current Russian armed forces are a fifth the size of the Soviet Union military that used to own all these weapons. Moreover, more than half the equipment to be scrapped is considered obsolete (by Russian standards). Nearly all of it is considered obsolete by Western standards. The rest of the world has picked over this pile of Cold War surplus for the last two decades, and bought what they thought might be useful. That made hardly a dent in the pile of abandoned weapons and equipment. READ MORE