Red Square parade masks creaking Russian military

By Dmitry Solovyov - Analysis

MOSCOW (Reuters) - The gleaming tanks and missile launchers that will roll through Red Square this week to show off Russia's military might will mask an army whose hardware and mentality are steeped in the Soviet past.

The parade on Friday will be the first time heavy armor has trundled past the Kremlin since 1990, the year before the Soviet Union collapsed. It is a display intended to underline Russia's economic and political revival after years of post-Soviet chaos.

But analysts say there is a wide gap between the proud image of its military the Kremlin is trying to project and reality.

"Russia's superpower status is more like wishful thinking," said Dr Marcel de Haas, a lieutenant-colonel in the Dutch armed forces and senior research fellow at the Netherlands Institute of International Relations Clingedael.

"Although they will show the most modern equipment they have, this 'state-of-the-art' of Russia's military forces is quite obsolete. There is no real modernization of the army."

SLOW TO REFORM

Russia's military is under close scrutiny. Russia has threatened to use force against its neighbor and would-be NATO member Georgia if Tbilisi attacks its Moscow-backed breakaway regions.

Russia remains a formidable military power and its nuclear arsenal is capable of wiping out the United States.

Its defense budget for last year was 22 percent higher than in 2006. Russia last year announced an eight-year program to spend $189 billion on new military hardware.

Former President Vladimir Putin last year ordered the resumption of regular patrols by strategic bombers, held large-scale military exercises with China and sent the navy to the Mediterranean and the Atlantic.

But the new hardware promised by the government has yet to arrive in significant numbers.

"Stories still emerge ... of Russian vessels deploying on exercise, looking very impressive from afar, but having the hatches painted shut on their missile tubes," said Nick Brown, editor-in-chief of Jane's International defense Review.

Even for Friday's parade, much of the weaponry on show will have been designed in the 1970s and 80s.

This includes the Tupolev Tu-160 strategic bomber, codenamed "Blackjack" by NATO and the world's heaviest combat aircraft, which will roar over Red Square.

A report by a group of Russian defense and political analysts said that from 2000-2007, Russia produced only one Tu-160 and 27 nuclear missiles -- a third of the number of missiles made in the 1990s.