Posted on 03/05/2009 12:13:32 AM PST by pobeda1945
ASTANA, March 4 (RIA Novosti) - Kazakhstan has signed a contract with Russia on the purchase of S-300 air defense missile systems, the Kazakh defense minister said on Wednesday.
"We have recently signed a contract with Russia and are buying S-300 systems," Danial Akhmetov said.
Last month, Kazakhstan announced plans to equip 10 battalions with S-300 air defense missile systems bought from Russia, with deliveries to begin in 2009.
The latest version of the S-300 family is the S-300PMU2 Favorit, which has a range of up to 195 kilometers (about 120 miles) and can intercept aircraft and ballistic missiles at altitudes from 10 meters to 27 kilometers.
It is considered one of the world's most effective all-altitude regional air defense systems, comparable in performance to the U.S. MIM-104 Patriot system.
Russia announced last year it was planning to expand military-technical cooperation with members of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) and set up an integrated air defense network with them.
The CSTO is a post-Soviet security grouping comprising Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.
Akhmetov said in mid-February that the delivery of S-300 systems "would help the republic's integration into the CSTO and significantly enhance the protection of the country's airspace." (Russian mobile surface-to-air missile systems - Image Gallery http://en.rian.ru/photolents/20070208/60402179.html)
I know Russia is laughing, but does it work?
Borat is going to be very pleased.
From CIA: “Kyrgyzstan has yet to ratify the 2001 boundary delimitation with Kazakhstan; field demarcation of the boundaries with Turkmenistan commenced in 2005, and with Uzbekistan in 2004; demarcation is scheduled to get underway with Russia in 2007; demarcation with China was completed in 2002; creation of a seabed boundary with Turkmenistan in the Caspian Sea remains under discussion; equidistant seabed treaties have been ratified with Azerbaijan and Russia in the Caspian Sea, but no resolution has been made on dividing the water column among any of the littoral states”
Seems like an overkill, unless Russia forced them to buy the system
Just a heads up - if anybody else does a google image search for Kazakhstan to look at a map to see what countries are nearby that Kazakhstan might want to defend against...
DO NOT click on the 2nd map that is from fartfly - trust me on this one -its not pretty.
<-—gone to scrub my hard drive.
It is quite advanced. That’s just the truck containing the missiles. There are others, e.g. with the radar system. As for the missile, it is quite lethal. As part of an IADS, only a Raptor would be able to operate in the environment. It is not a missile you want to get shot at with.
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