Translated material
Range X
It will not be easy for Russia and the United States to begin joint use of the Gabala radar station
Political and technological difficulties may arise in the implementation of President Vladimir Putin's proposal to US President George W. Bush, voiced at the G8 summit in Germany, to jointly use the Gabala radar station in Azerbaijan in the missile defense system. Experts make such conclusions when commenting on this initiative.Among the political difficulties, commentators include, in particular, the fact that Russia leases a radar base in Azerbaijan, and does not own it . However, this problem can be overcome during trilateral consultations between the United States, Russia and Azerbaijan, at which the new status of the base can be considered. Much greater political obstacles to the implementation of the idea can be caused by its fundamentally different interpretation by the parties.
On Friday, the White House released comments from US National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, who was part of the American delegation at the Heiligendamm summit. He called the Russian initiative “interesting” and regarded it as a willingness to consider cooperation with the United States in countering a common threat. "The goal is to create a system that will protect Russia, the United States and Europe from threats from rogue states," Mr. Hadley said. But at the same time, Moscow, through the mouth of President Putin, made it clear that its proposal should automatically mean the US abandonment of plans to deploy missile defense elements in close proximity to the Russian borders - in Poland and the Czech Republic. While so far not a single official representative of the Bush administration has said that, even by agreeing to the joint use of the Daryal radar in Gabala, the United States will refuse to deploy the third echelon of its missile defense system in Eastern Europe. On the contrary, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice confirmed in an interview with AP that the Russian proposal will not affect American plans in this area.
Against this background, another political problem - a possible deterioration in Russia's relations with Iran - looks simply unnoticeable.
The main technological difficulty is that the Gabala radar is an early warning system, and not the so-called X-band radar, which is used for missile defense guidance and which the Bush administration intends to place in the Czech Republic. In other words, the Americans are tempted to insist that the Gabala radar and the missile defense system in Eastern Europe will complement each other: Gabala warns of a missile launch from Iran, and the missile defense elements in the Czech Republic and Poland make it possible to launch interceptor missiles.
The technological backwardness of the Gabala radar station was indirectly recognized by Vladimir Putin, who said yesterday at a press conference following the G8 summit that Russia, if necessary (which the president, however, does not yet see), is ready to modernize this station and transmit data from it in the online.
Another problem in the implementation of the Russian initiative was outlined by NATO Secretary General (not all countries in this organization have an unambiguous attitude towards the American plans to deploy missile defense in Poland and the Czech Republic) Jaap de Hoop Scheffer. In his opinion, Azerbaijan is too close to those countries that pose a threat to the security of the West. But at the same time, he has so far refrained from making final judgments on the Russian initiative. Since, unlike the United States and the countries of the European Union, where Iranian intercontinental ballistic missiles that do not yet exist in nature are unlikely to reach, Azerbaijan is located in close proximity to Iran, the security of this former Soviet republic in the event of its participation in an anti-Iranian missile defense system may indeed raise concerns.
One thing is clear: the fate of the Russian initiative directly depends on the success of those global consultations on missile defense issues at the military and diplomatic level that Russia and the United States agreed upon during the Heiligendamm summit.
The Gabala radar station “Daryal” with a range of about 6 thousand km was put into operation in 1984. She entered combat duty in February 1985. It is part of the Russian missile attack warning system and is designed to detect the launch of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) in the Southern Hemisphere, including from the Indian Ocean, and control aerospace in southern directions. The Daryal radar allows monitoring air and space over the territory of Iran, Turkey, India, Iraq, Pakistan, part of China, as well as a number of other Asian and African countries. The current legal status of the radar station in Gabala is determined by the agreement between Russia and Azerbaijan dated January 25, 2002.