The Hindu : International : Russia not to sell arms to Pakistan

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Jul 10, 2004

International

International

Russia not to sell arms to Pakistan

By Vladimir Radyuhin

MOSCOW, JULY 9. Russia today said it has no plans to give weapons to Pakistan and rejected complaints that Russian arms supplies to India has upset the balance of forces in the region.

"There are no concrete plans to have such (military-technical) cooperation with Pakistan," Russia's Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, said today after talks with the visiting Pakistani Foreign Minister, Khurshid Mehmood Kasuri. Prior to the talks Mr. Kasuri said he was going to discuss the question of defence cooperation with Mr. Lavrov.

Mr. Lavrov also took objection to Mr. Kasuri's claim that Russian supplies of advanced military aircraft to India have created a `disbalance' in the region.

Answering a question about Russian arms sales to India, Mr. Kasuri said Pakistan was taking measures to redress a "disbalance in high-performance aircraft that have been supplied to India from all over the world, including Russia".

In a rejoinder, Mr. Lavrov said that Russia's "defence cooperation with India is in no way upsetting the balance of forces in South Asia, and we are paying close attention so that this does not happen.

"Russia pursues military-technical cooperation with India in the same forms and basically on the same terms that Pakistan does with other countries," he said.

Mr. Kasuri renewed Islamabad's call to Russia to help advance peace talks with India, but the MR. Lavrov confined himself to welcoming "the efforts taken by the leadership of India and Pakistan to normalise relations between the two countries, including discussion of CBMs (confidence building measures) in the nuclear field".

Moscow appears to have made headway in persuading Islamabad to drop its objection to Russian interaction with the Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC). Mr. Kasuri said Pakistan welcomed "some form of Russia's association with OIC," though he stopped short of supporting the Russian bid to get an observer status. Mr. Lavrov, for his part, said he was "fully satisfied" with the Pakistani response.

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