During his Russia visit, India and Russia will sign a joint declaration on co-developing Indo-Russian Multi Role Transport Aircraft based on IL-214 airframe. It is also known that they will also be discussing a contract on upgrading the Su-30MKI. Unconfirmed news are that next round of price negotiations for Admiral Gorshkov may take place during this time. Just to notify, India has bought the mothballed Soviet aircraft cruiser Admiral Gorshkov from Russian in 2004. Under the contract, Russia will give the ship free of cost but India has to pay for its retrofitment costs and for its air complement of 12 MiG 29K's. Since then both countries have failed to agree to a final price with Russia demanding more money while India negotiating on reducing the asked amount.
India is also planning to conduct several missile tests including underwater launched brahmos missile as well as Sagarika/Shaurya missile anytime this year apart from the other missile systems which are already inducted. Even though most of these tests user trials, information is that many new systems are incorporated into them and these tests are to validate those systems.
Another news, though not directly related India's defense but may have implications in it, is that U.S President Obama has once again assured the US congress that he will not let India continue developing its nuclear missile programme. Need to wait and watch how our political fraternity is going to respond to this. Me for one thinks that US is the most unreliable ally and should care less about our relationship with it. After all, normal relationship will anyway be maintained even if we don't try hard.
Well, that's all for now. This is a test post to test the option of email posting. Hope it works.
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