Lofty Goals

Aleksey Nikolsky

Moscow: On 25 June 2018, President Vladimir Putin signed Decree No 364 outlining the goals set before the Era Military Innovation Technopolis, an R&D centre being built near the Black Sea resort town of Anapa. The centre will be run by the ministry of defence (MoD) but utilise the principle of military-civilian partnership. Construction at the 17-hectare (42 acre) site, formerly a MoD resort, began last spring. The draft of the presidential decree ordering Era’s establishment was released for public consultation in January (Nikolski A., Bocharova S. Shoygu to replace Rogozin at the Advanced Research Foundation // Vedomosti, 26.02.2018).

Russian Federation’s ministry of defence headquarters in Moscow

The Era Technopolis concept was approved by defence minister Sergey Shoygu on 18 December 2017 (Era Technopolis // Arsenal Otechestva, 2018, No 3). The launch of the facility is scheduled for September 2018, and the completion of all construction work for 2020. Era will consist of three clusters:

• Research Cluster for R&D, laboratory experiments and simulation modelling;
• Education Cluster for military personnel, cadets and students studying military specializations at civilian universities; and
• Production Cluster for building prototypes of military and special hardware (Era Technopolis // Arsenal Otechestva, 2018, No 3).
• Era’s R&D chief is Mikhail Kovalchuk, President of the Kurchatov Institute, who is known to have been close to President Putin since the Nineties. Another interesting fact is that the Lider company, which was officially affiliated with Kovalchuk’s brother Yuri until 2016, may be chosen by the MoD as a partner for a programme of refurbishing central heating systems at military compounds across Russia. A concession agreement on which the programme will be based is currently bein