KUALA LUMPUR. May 19 (Interfax-AVN) - Russian-Indian naval exercises will begin in the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal on Tuesday and Wednesday.
"A squad of Russian warships that are currently located in the Indian Ocean will be divided into two groups including ships from the Black Sea and Pacific Fleets," Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov told journalists in Kuala Lumpur, where he arrived for a working visit on Sunday.
He said the Black Sea Fleet ships will operate with India's Western Fleet in the Arabian Sea and the Pacific Fleet ships will work with the Indian Eastern Fleet in the Bay of Bengal off India's eastern coast.
Nine Russian ships of both the Black Sea and Pacific Fleets are located in the Indian Ocean, including the missile cruiser Moskva and the large anti-submarine ships Admiral Panateleyev and Marshal Shaposhnikov.
"Everyone can see that the exercises in the Indian Ocean were in no way connected with the war in Iraq. We purposely delayed the start the exercises and waited for the end of the war," he said.
Ivanov highly commended the launches of cruise missiles from TU-95MS Bear strategic bombers against surface targets in the Indian Ocean on May 14. "We exercised joint operations of strategic planes and ships at a very long distance form our borders for the first time. These kind of exercises were not conducted in the Soviet era," Ivanov said.
He pointed out that "new adjustment methods, given the absence of any points of reference on the water surface, were developed to launch long-range cruise missiles." "The launches showed that these methods work excellently," the Russian defense minister said.
He said that "on May 16, a squad of Russian warships located in the Indian Ocean held a training launch of a Bazalt long-range cruise missile and anti-aircraft missiles, as well as performed artillery firing. Each ship carried out practice launches," Ivanov said.