Truth is stranger than fiction–or so the saying goes. Nothing illustrates this more than the intersection of arms salesmen, government spokesmen, press reporting and a series of mysterious events leading up to the Paris Air Show at Le Bourget. In the first week of March, Ivan Safranov, a retired Russian colonel and correspondent for the last decade at the Moscow newspaper Kommersant, was found dead outside of his apartment building. Questions raised about several aspects of his death still remain unanswered.
Putin’s next big customer?
Safranov lived on the third floor of his building, but he had for some reason fallen from the fifth floor. He was fully clothed and wearing an overcoat, as if he had just returned from a trip to the market. A bag of mandarins was found scattered on the ground near his body. When he landed on the ground he had hit headfirst, which one tends not to do unless they are already unconscious at the time of their fall. Needless to say, if he was unconscious he could not have jumped from the window of the fifth floor without having been “assisted” in the process. Not surprisingly, the Russian prosecutors assigned to the case wanted to rule his death a suicide, despite all of the evidence to the contrary. Safranov had made a name for himself by investigating stories related to arms sales and the defense industrial complex in Russia. In the past he had been visited by officers from the Federal Security Service (FSB) demanding to know how he had come to have possession of the information contained in his articles. Just prior to his death he had been working on a story about how Russia intended to sell advanced military aircraft and other weapon systems to Iran. In order to avoid any unpleasantness, the plan was to ship these aircraft through a third country–either Belarus or Syria–so that Russia’s arms export agency monopoly, Rosoboronexport (ROE), could claim plausible deniability for the sale. Fast forward to this week’s show at Le Bourget. Russia’s Kommersant newspaper reported on Tuesday that ROE were preparing to deliver five Mikoyan MiG-31E fighter aircraft to Syria, as well as an undetermined number of MiG-29M/M2 fighters, in a deal worth more than $1 billion. The MiG-29M/M2 aircraft would be new production models, but the MiG-31Es would be used Russian air force aircraft refurbished and upgraded at the Sokol plant in Nizhni-Novgorod, Russia.
The Russian daily also announced that the deal was being financed by Iran, and that there was speculation that some or all of the aircraft would be transferred to Iran under the auspices of the two nations’ mutual defense agreement. The order for the MiGs, which was supposedly made in January, was negotiated last fall during a state visit to Moscow by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The contract to deliver these aircraft was denied later the same day by ROE General Director Sergei Chemezov at his agency’s press conference here at Le Bourget. “Russia has no plans to supply fighters to Syria and Iran,” he said. “If talks start with these countries, it will be announced.” In Moscow, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Mikhail Kamynin also denied the charge in a statement: “All of Russia’s deals in the sphere of military-technical cooperation comply with international law and Russia’s obligations under various treaties and United Nations resolutions.” The denials are even more curious than the death of Safranov. Kommersant’s story this week stated that Federal Industry Agency Chairman Boris Alyoshin, whose agency controls Russia’s defense industry, confirmed that there is a contract in place to supply these upgraded MiG-31Es to a foreign customer, but declined to name which customer. Another source within the Russian delegation here at Le Bourget also confirmed that there was a contract in place for $400 million to supply the five MiG-31s to an unspecified “Middle East nation.” This confirmation of the order but the refusal to specify the end user makes it appear as though Moscow would find it inconvenient for this to become public knowledge. And despite confirmation from two authoritative sources, Rosoboronexport continues to deny that there is any such sale in the works. This promises to be a pattern for the future. ROE and its predecessor agencies have been courting the Iranians for years. The Russia arms exporter even sent relief supplies to Iran after a severe earthquake in order to curry favor with the Islamic Republic. With arms sales now closely controlled by the Kremlin, and Russia determined to reassert its presence in isolated nations that need both modern arms and partners in the energy industry, it is only a question of time before Iran becomes the next big customer for Russian weapons. Unfortunately, there is almost no transparency about these deals or any other aspect of Russia’s government dealings. Increasingly it will only be at a those rare junctures where all of these personalities and forces intersect–as at Le Bourget this week–that we will learn even the smallest of details about these sales.
