Global Insights: Mistral Talks Reveal Russian Shipbuilding Maladies

During his sojourn in Paris last Friday and Saturday, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and his entourage of Russian economics ministers and business executives signed a number of important commercial agreements with their French counterparts. These two-dozen deals will result in increased French involvement in various Russian energy and automobile enterprises, in return for sizable injections of French financing and technology into these sectors.

"We are on the way to achieving this goal to transform our good, high-level political relations in the sphere of the real economy," Putin joyfully told journalists. "I think it is a real breakthrough in the economic cooperation sphere." ...