ST. PETERSBURG, Russia — Russia signed a contract worth more than $1.43 billion Friday to buy two French warships — the largest military deal between a NATO country and Moscow to date that will likely worry some of Russia’s neighbors.
President Dmitry Medvedev oversaw the signing
ceremony in the country’s second-largest city, St. Petersburg, and French President Nicolas Sarkozy welcomed the deal in a statement released by his office.
The statement said the Mistral class assault ships will be made in France by the companies DCNS and STX at a shipbuilding plant in the town of Saint-Nazaire, creating 1,000 jobs in France over four years. The contract signing “testifies to the strategic dimension of this cooperation between France and Russia,” it said.
The U.S. has expressed concerns that a sale would send the wrong message to American allies in central and eastern Europe, Russian neighbors who are alarmed by the plan.
French Trade Minister Pierre Lellouche told reporters the deal was worth $1.6 billion, but Anatoly Isaikin, chief of the Russian state arms exporter Rosoboronexport, put it at $1.7 billion. The discrepancy couldn’t be immediately explained.
Under a preliminary agreement in December, two more ships will be constructed jointly by French and Russian shipbuilders, but Lellouche said “the third and the fourth ships are still the subject of further contract.”
The trade minister described the deal as a “historical event” and pointed that that is “the first time Russia imports a weapon from a Western country and it’s the first time a Western country exports a weapon to Russia after the Second World War.”
The talks on the deal have dragged on for months amid disputes about how many ships would be built and where, and how much sensitive technology France would share.
Roman Trotsenko, spokesman for Russia’s state-controlled United Shipbuilding Corp., told Russian Rossiya 24 television that Russian industries will produce about 40 percent of the components for the first two ships.
Trotsenko said France also has agreed to provide Russia with the proprietary state-of-the art command and control system for the ships, which are more advanced than the technology the Russian navy has.
“The French side has agreed to an unprecedented level of cooperation in the technology transfer,” he said.
The first ship will be supplied in 2014 and the second one will follow the next year, Russian news reports said.
Russian navy chief, Adm. Vladimir Vysotsky, told reporters after the signing that the navy would use the ships as command centers, taking advantage of their sophisticated electronic control systems.
The Mistral, which could carry as many as 16 helicopters and dozens of armored vehicles, would allow Russia to land hundreds of troops quickly on foreign soil.
The prospect has alarmed human rights activists and Georgia, which fought a brief war against Russia in 2008, as well as the ex-Soviet Baltic nations in NATO who are worried about Russia’s increasing sway over its neighbors.
Russian news agencies quoted a Defense Ministry official as saying that both French ships will be based in Vladivostok on the Pacific coast and help protect the Kuril Islands.
Russia and Japan have competing claims over four southern Kuril islands — known in Japan as the Northern Territories — and this has kept them from signing a formal peace treaty ending their World War II hostilities. Tensions have risen after Medvedev in November became the first Russian president to visit the islands and the Russian military announced plans to beef up its forces there.
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