Can Russia deliver on arms sales?

Moscow is moving aggressively to recapture its Soviet-era dominance in the global arms bazaar, and the scale of recent Russian salesmanship in Asia has raised deep anxieties in Washington. But some experts say Russia is peddling weapons it doesn't have, as part of a desperate marketing ploy initiated by President Vladimir Putin to save the bankrupt ex-Soviet defense industry from collapse.

On paper, Russian exports look feisty. In 1999, Moscow signed $3.5 billion in foreign arms sales, to rank fourth in global arms exports. This year sales are estimated at $4 billion. But the Kremlin's dazzling new arms showroom may be an illusion, built on obsolete hardware pulled from Soviet military warehouses and a lot of energetic sales talk about modern weapons systems that are still on the drawing board.

"Most of our sales pitches these days are little more than a confidence trick, because Russia lacks the capacity to produce many of the armaments it is promising," says Vitaly Shlyikov, a former Russian deputy defense minister, who is now an independent military expert with the Council of Foreign and Defense Policy in Moscow. "Our military, as well as our arms exporters, have been living for the past 10 years on the stockpiles amassed by the USSR for World War III."

The art of selling decrepit arms

Last week Moscow said it is negotiating the sale of up to five ultramodern Beriev A-50E early-warning aircraft, similar to the US's AWACS system, to Beijing. The US recently blocked Israel from exporting a similar plane, because it could give China an edge in any future confrontation with US ally Taiwan.

Moscow has also torn up a 1995 agreement with the Clinton administration not to sell conventional arms to Iran, and will soon resume deliveries it says will include submarines, tanks, and sophisticated ordinance.

In the past year, Russia has concluded contracts to sell state-of-the-art SU-30MK fighter planes to India and China. It is currently offering advanced helicopter gunships to Turkey, and anti-aircraft missiles, warships, tanks, and fighter planes to a variety of other countries.

But after a decade of severe budget-cutting, and almost zero procurement by the Russian military, the ability of arms factories to deliver on many of these contracts appears in serious doubt.

"The Russian armed forces have kept going by upgrading existing weapons, and won't be in a position to buy new ones in any quantity until at least 2005," says Valentin Rudenko, an expert with the independent military news agency AVN in Moscow. "Money from foreign sources is all that keeps some design bureaus and production lines alive, but it's clearly not enough".

Mr. Shlyikov, a veteran of Soviet military intelligence who spent 10 years heading a secret committee that compared the USSR's defense potential with that of Western countries, says few people really know the parlous state of Russia's once-vaunted military-industrial complex.

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