Tyler Rogoway has a nice overview of the Mistral BPC sale to Russia over at his blog Foxtrot Alpha. Check it out here. For the life of me I'll never understand why the US didn't step in and have these approx 16000 ton ships act as potential "cheap" LHAs/LPDs and test the concept for the USMC before giving them to the US Navy, Coast Guard or even SOCOM to use as they saw fit.
A couple of things are obvious. We don't want Russia to have this type of power projection and more should have been done to stop the sale.
