{"id":32340,"date":"2015-08-12T05:00:24","date_gmt":"2015-08-12T09:00:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=32340"},"modified":"2017-08-14T09:04:06","modified_gmt":"2017-08-14T13:04:06","slug":"who-might-buy-a-mistral","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/08\/12\/who-might-buy-a-mistral\/","title":{"rendered":"Who might buy a Mistral<\/em>?"},"content":{"rendered":"

At the International Business Times<\/em>, Christopher Harress<\/a> reports on the two Mistral<\/em>-class helicopter carriers France built for Russia and is now trying to find new homes for:<\/p>\n

\"The

The Sevastopol<\/em> (left) and the Vladivostok<\/em> warships, two Mistral<\/em> class LHD amphibious vessels ordered by Russia from STX France, are seen in St. Nazaire, France, Dec. 20, 2014. Jean-Sebastien Evrard\/Agence France-Presse\/Getty Images<\/p><\/div>\n

Inside the sprawling dockyard in the ancient town of St. Nazaire in southwestern France sits $1.2 billion worth of unsold naval hardware. Despite having never left the dock, the two Mistral<\/em> helicopter landing ships, originally built by France for use in the Russian navy, inadvertently have become involved in the growing international dispute between Russia and the West over the annexation of Crimea and the war in eastern Ukraine.<\/p>\n

Now they are causing problems in France.<\/p>\n

Two days after managing to negotiate a way out of the deal<\/a> with Moscow that had become a divisive, ethical and political dilemma in Europe, France faces the fresh challenge of looking for a new buyer that has both the military need and the hard cash for the two 21,000 ton warships.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think this will be a difficult product to sell,\u201d said Dakota Wood, senior research fellow of defense programs at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington think tank. \u201cMilitary ships are highly specialized and designed for a specific purpose that accounts for all the weapons systems and unique specifications that the navy in questions needs. In this case, the spacing and logistics to accommodate the unique aircraft that Russia was going to use. What other country shares those exact specifications?\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

With Canada in the middle of a long, long election campaign, there’s no point in pretending that one or both of the ships might end up as part of the Royal Canadian Navy (unlike a few earlier<\/a> reports<\/a>), so France is forced to look further abroad for countries that have both the ready money (like Saudi Arabia) and the pressing need (uh, like Saudi Arabia).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At the International Business Times, Christopher Harress reports on the two Mistral-class helicopter carriers France built for Russia and is now trying to find new homes for: Inside the sprawling dockyard in the ancient town of St. Nazaire in southwestern France sits $1.2 billion worth of unsold naval hardware. Despite having never left the dock, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[62,1117,5,1119],"tags":[617,565,30],"class_list":["post-32340","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-europe","category-france","category-military","category-russia","tag-carriers","tag-helicopters","tag-navy"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-8pC","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32340","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32340"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32340\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32344,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32340\/revisions\/32344"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32340"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32340"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32340"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}