The Hindu : Russia makes progress on missile defence

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Mar 29, 2004

International

International

Russia makes progress on missile defence

By Vladimir Radyuhin

MOSCOW, MARCH 28. Russia has made good headway in developing a missile defence system, as well as weapons capable of overcoming missile shields, a Defence Ministry official said.

"We are ahead of many other nations in some areas of anti-missile defence," a senior source in the Russian Ministry of Defence told reporters on Sunday. He said the Russian missile-defence technology will be cost-effective.

"It will not require the huge resources some nations are sinking into this project without knowing the result," the source said. "We cannot and will not make such high-risk outlays, but the country's defence potential will not suffer."

He described as "next to revolutionary" the development by Russia of a ballistic missile capable of zigzagging on its approach to target to confuse missile defences. "This is a serious breakthrough that effectively changes the philosophy of military-strategic interaction," the source said. Last month Russia successfully test-fired a ballistic missile armed with manoeuvrable warheads, prompting the President, Vladimir Putin, to say that the new weapon system will enter service "in the near future."

The Russian Defence Minister, Sergei Ivanov, said last week that Russia will build an integrated "air and space defence." He was earlier quoted as saying that the U.S. withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty last year had untied Moscow's hands and it would `definitely' deploy theatre missile defence and space defence systems.

"We have technologies in the sphere of missile defence that no one else in the world has," the Russian defence chief said.

The former Space Forces Commander, General Anatoly Perminov, explained that Russia has embarked on radical modernisation of its missile-defence weapons and ground controls of space-based systems. This is the first step towards `unification of the means of destruction and early warning systems," said Gen. Perminov, who was appointed head of the newly established Federal Space Agency (former Rosaviakosmos aviation and space agency) earlier this month.

Analysts said the latest spate of statements regarding Russia's progress in missile defence technology appeared to be linked to a new round of NATO enlargement this week. The admission on March 29 of seven new members, including the three former Soviet Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, will for the first time bring NATO to the border with mainland Russia.

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