We’ve covered this Kyrgyzstan double-dipping story a couple of times here, but Alexander Golts latest piece over at RealClearWorld sums it up nicely – including the tale of the embarrassing trip made by Igor Sechin and Anatoly Serdyukov to go collect.  Golts lists the Kyrgyzstan folly as just one of Russia’s many recent conflicts with neighbors

In February, the Kremlin gave Kyrgyz President Kurmanbek Bakiyev
$500 million for a promise to close America’s base in his country. Then
the Americans offered Bakiyev $160 million a year, and now there may be
no official base, but a “transit center” that serves the same
functions. So the Kremlin paid out several hundred million dollars just
to replace some signs.

Soon after this, Russian Vice Premier Igor Sechin and Defense
Minister Anatoly Serdyukov were sent to Bishkek in an effort to get
something for Russia’s money. Bakiyev seems to have said: So, you are
worried about the American military presence in Central Asia, and you
want to confront it. Fine, the Americans can have one base in
Kyrgyzstan, and Russia can have two.

The resulting “military asset,” however, is strategic gibberish,
having been built in Kyrgyzstan’s near-lawless Osh region, with its
appalling poverty, drug trafficking, and ethnic tensions. Seizure of a
Russian military base in order to acquire weapons is, indeed, likely to
become a vital goal of “extremists.” But, in a way, the Russian
soldiers there are already hostages – not least to the Kremlin’s
bankrupt foreign policy.

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