Analysts: Russia Must Secure Its Weapons

By Simon Saradzhyan

Staff Writer

Published: November 26, 2002 (Issue # 823)

For The St. Petersburg Times Federal forces have siezed more than a dozen shoulder-mounted Iglas this year.

MOSCOW - Russia should take stock of its own weapons stockpile and boost security near its airbases and southern frontiers if it wants to limit the number of aircraft shot down by Chechen rebels, military analysts said Monday.

Igla shoulder-fired missiles were blamed for two of the three helicopter crashes in Chechnya in the past three months. At least 119 people died in one of the crashes.

In response, Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov last week urged his counterparts from other former Soviet republics to take a tally of their Igla missiles, saying he suspected that some had ended up in rebel hands after being sold or stolen. He also recently suspended the chief of army aviation.

Analysts said that even if Russia's neighbors do take stock, it might still prove impossible to determine how Chechen rebels got the Iglas. While the missiles' launch tubes should bear serial numbers showing where they were produced, it would be near to impossible to figure out where some of them ended up after the breakup of the Soviet Union.

"Ivanov's appeal does put pressure on Russia's neighbors to act ... but it may prove impossible to implement," said Marat Kenzhetayev, a conventional-weapons expert at the Center for Arms Control, Energy and Environmental Studies.

The Defense Ministry lost track of 260,000 small arms and light weapons, including Igla and Strela shoulder-fired missiles in the Transcaucasus region alone, as Soviet republics rushed to claim sovereignity over Soviet arsenals on their territory, according to the Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies.

"There was a bit of chaos as the republics divided up the weapons," said Maxim Pyadushkin, an arms expert with the research center. Iglas also might have been whisked out of poorly guarded arsenals in the early 1990s, he said.

Furthermore, there are a number of countries that have purchased Iglas since 1991, including Singapore, India and Malaysia. Malaysia and Singapore even produce their own Iglas under license, but it is unlikely that they have sold any of these missiles to Chechen rebels, Pyadushkin said. However, Russia should first take a look at its own inventory, since it has more of these missiles than any of its neighbors, he said.

"There should be an inventory taken to see where thefts could have occurred," he said.

A decade after the Soviet collapse, the Russian armed forces have yet to count exactly how many and what kind of weapons it has in its arsenals. Almost every defense minister has promised to perform the count, but it has never been completed, Pyadushkin said.

Federal forces have seized more than a dozen Iglas in Chechnya this year. The latest find was reported Monday. Authorities have been checking the serial numbers of the seized tubes against the records of the Degtyarev plant in the city of Kovrov in the Vladimirskaya Oblast, which remains the sole manufacturer of the missiles in the former Soviet Union. So far, however, there have been no arrests as a result, although the checks have allowed the Federal Security Service to conclude that some of the Iglas used to down helicopters in Chechnya were produced in the 1980s.

Iglas, which the Degtyarev plant started to produce about 20 years ago, have a guaranteed service life of 10 years, Pyadushkin said.

An Igla can hit a target at an altitude of up to 3 1/2 kilometers. All Iglas produced for the Soviet or Russian armed forces are equipped with a friend-or-foe system, which should prevent the missiles from hitting Russian aircraft.

That means Chechen rebels have either managed to find a way to deactivate the system or they use Iglas that have been exported to foreign countries and have no such system, Kenzhetayev said.

Government agencies have not recently released any statistics for the number of aircraft brought down in Chechnya since the beginning of the ongoing military campaign. The Air Force press service declined to comment Monday.

However, a count done by Ezhenedelny Zhurnal found that at least 37 helicopters and 11 warplanes have been lost due to various causes, including enemy fire. In comparison, the military lost only 14 helicopters during the war from 1994 to 1996, the magazine reported in August.