As the Arab League agreed to go to the United Nations Security Council early this week with a resolution calling for Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad to step down, Russia was reportedly doing a major arms deal with the beleaguered regime.
The $550 million agreement to sell 36 Yak-130 combat aircraft will not do anything to tip the balance in favor of the Al-Assad regime, which has been engaged in a 10-month conflict with anti-government opposition. But Russia is almost certainly providing arms Damascus needs to hold back the rebels as well as mounting a diplomatic defense of its friend at the U.N..
In a rare glimpse into the Russia-Syrian arms trade, a ship loaded with ammunition from Russia was briefly detained in Cyprus earlier this month before continuing its journey unmolested to the Syrian port of Tartus.
“Syria is an important customer for the Russian military industry and the industry is quite keen to maintain the relationship,” Fyodor Lukyanov, the editor-in-chief of the Moscow based foreign policy journal Russia in Global Affairs, told The Media Line. “Syria is one of the few remaining customers in the region and it hosts the only military base – a small one but still a base – that Russia still has outside its own borders.”
The Voice of Russia radio’s website said in December without citing a source that Russian arms exports reached $11 billion last year, a three-fold increase from 2000. While the country’s biggest customers are India and China, the Middle East had been a growing market until the Arab Spring eliminated Al-Qaddafi and sanctions on Iran removed another customer. Syria alone, according to some estimates, accounted for 7% of all Russian arms sales in 2010.
http://www.themedialine.org/news/news_detail.asp?NewsID=34271 [2]