Azernews.Az

Russia has dismissed a report about the sale of S-300 air defense missiles to Azerbaijan. According to Russian RIA Novosti news agency, a representative of Russian state arms exporter Rosoboronexport, Vyacheslav Davidenko, has commented that no such agreement has been reached between the two countries.

Russian business daily Vedomosti has claimed that Azerbaijan’s Defense Ministry and Rosoboronexport signed a contract in 2009 for the delivery of S-300 air defense missile systems worth $300 million to Azerbaijan. The newspaper quoted an unnamed Russian military official as saying that the purchase would unlikely change the balance of power between Azerbaijan and neighboring Armenia, which have been at odds for almost two decades over the rebel region of Nagorno Karabakh. None of the countries has modern fighter jets, cruise or ballistic missiles which S-300 air defense systems are designed to intercept.

The official told the paper that Azerbaijan was rather trying to assure its security to ward off a potential threat from Iran.

The deal is the most expensive single purchase of weapons by a former Soviet state, excluding Russia, Mikhail Barabanov, the editor-in-chief of the English-language Moscow Defense Brief magazine, told Vedomosti. Russia has also sold S-300 missiles to Belarus and Kazakhstan, but these deals were much cheaper.

Outside the post-Soviet area, Russia has also delivered S-300 air defense systems to Algeria and China. In December 2005, Moscow signed a contract on supplying Iran with at least five S-300 systems, but the contract's implementation has so far been delayed.

Until the 1990s, Azerbaijan had possessed one of the most advanced air defense systems in the Soviet area, Vedomosti said. However, these systems have since become obsolete.

Azerbaijan has been actively modernizing its military sphere, including the purchase of weapons from Ukraine, Belarus, Israel and South Africa, the head of the Russian Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies (CAST), Ruslan Pukhov, told Vedomosti. If Moscow did not supply modern air defense systems to its former Soviet neighbor, then either South Africa or Israel would have done it, he said.