RUSSIA - Feb. 18 - Putin Sees Missile Fizzle.

On Feb. 18, for the second day in a row, Pres. Putin oversees one of Russia's largest strategic military exercises in years, and for a second day in a row something went wrong. An intercontinental ballistic missile fired from the nuclear submarine Karelia in the Barents Sea veered off course 98 seconds after launching and then self-destructed. (The cause of the malfunction was not clear but would be investigated. The missile had been intended to cross the Arctic and land in a missile range in Kamchatka, in Russia's Far East, but it exploded instead in the upper atmosphere over the Barents Sea. On Feb. 17, two missiles from the submarine Novomoskovsk in the Barents Sea also failed to launch - for reasons that remained in dispute a day later - even as Putin watched from the deck of another submarine. Officials had previously described the Feb. 17 launches as a centerpiece of the exercises, which involve Russia's strategic nuclear forces. On Feb. 17 the navy's commander, Admiral Vladimir Kuroyedov, denied reports that the missiles had malfunctioned. He said the missile tests Putin was on hand to see had always been planned as simulations, not live firings. Then the newspapers Kommersant and Izvestia reported on Feb. 18 the launches were aborted because of a malfunction in one of the missiles. The papers wrote that the navy was trying to cover up an embarrassing failure. Putin's much publicissed visit to the exercises came three and a half weeks before Russians vote on March 14 in a presidential election and appeared intended to highlight his role as commander-in-chief of a revived Russian military). Pavel Felgenhauer, a military analyst and journalist, says the glitches in the exercises reflect the agiing of Russia's arsenal of ballistic missiles, many of them nearly 30 years old. "With such old missiles, mishaps do happen", he says. "They have happened before. This time the PR surrounding the president and the presidential campaign meant more attention was paid. They demonstrated quite the opposite of what the Kremlin wanted". In remarks on Feb. 18 from a missile base in Arkhangelsk region, where he observed a successful satellite launch, Putin did not mention the malfunctions but praised the results of the exercises as positive. He also said that Russia was prepared to develop new strategic weapons and to consider creating a missile defence system, (though he did not elaborate. Analysts said Putin's remarks were intended to reach a domestic and an international audience, reflecting Russian concerns about the Bush administration's efforts to expand and update US nuclear forces). "It is obvious that a combat ready army, including its nuclear forces, is the most import factor of our national security, of the balance of forces in the world and, obviously, of strategic stability", Putin says in televised remarks.