Posted on 09/26/2002 7:48:40 AM PDT by Jake0001
Ukraine responds to 'Iraqi sales' claim
Ukraine's opposition is staging a second day of protests Ukrainian Foreign Minister Anatoly Zlenko is to hold urgent talks in the United Nations, following allegations that Kiev approved the sale of advanced radar systems to Iraq.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Serhiy Borodenkov said Mr Zlenko had broken off a trip to the Dominican Republic to meet UN Secretary General Kofi Annan in New York.
He is also expected to meet the Chairman of the UN Security Council's Iraqi sanctions committee, Ole Peter Kolby.
The visits comes after Nato Secretary-General George Robertson said "very serious questions" needed to be answered about evidence emerging of the alleged deal.
Earlier, the United States announced it was suspending more than $50m in aid to Ukraine and launching a policy review of its relations with the country.
Presidential administration head Viktor Medvedchuk said the accusations were aimed at boosting opposition to Mr Kuchma.
The row comes as Kiev faces a deep internal crisis, with opposition supporters holding a second day of protests and making increasingly vocal calls for Mr Kuchma's resignation.
US concern
Ukrainian Economics Minister Oleksandr Shlapak dismissed the accusations and said his government did not understand the US decision.
His remarks were the first high-level response from Ukraine to an announcement by Washington that the US is reviewing its policies towards a country that has been in the top five recipients of US aid for more than a decade.
The move comes after US officials authenticated tape recordings, in which they say President Leonid Kuchma is heard approving the sale of Kolchuga early warning radar systems to Iraq.
Speaking on the eve of his departure to Washington as head of Ukraine's delegation to the IMF and the World Bank, Mr Shlapak said there was still no proof that Ukraine has illegally sold weapons systems to Iraq.
Although existing humanitarian aid projects will be unaffected, Washington's decision is an unambiguous gesture of concern, says BBC Russian regional analyst Steven Eke.
The evidence is a secretly-made audio recording by Mr Kuchma's former security officer Mykola Melnychenko, in which the president is apparently heard approving a scheme to smuggle four radars to Iraq via a Jordanian intermediary.
Transcripts of the conversation have been in the public domain for some months, and the State Department says its delayed reaction is due to time-consuming efforts to authenticate the recording.
The US State Department says it has indications that the Ukrainian radars may already be in Iraq.
Known as passive radars, they are reported to be able to locate all types of aircraft - including stealth aircraft - while themselves remaining virtually undetectable.
Thank you for adding some common sense to this debate. I remember when this was first reported widely during the Kosovo action. Everyone thought, "Oh my! Stealth is defeated!"
For crying out loud, you can still see stealth aircraft through a telescope, too, but that doesn't mean stealth technology is defeated! Physics is constant. You don't get a free lunch, ever.
If there's a counter-measure, there's a counter-counter-measure.
How Clintonian. He knows damned well whether they sold weapons to Iraq.
Weapons systems will have backup power (local generators, etc.).
If one were to raise the transmitter a couple hundred miles, that 3-dimentional area, while encompassing a lot of altitude, would encompass little more than the area of the receiver itself in the horizontal axes at the angle between the satellite in question and the receiver.
The devil in the terrestrial case is where the transmitters/receivers are. I rather doubt that Iraq (or for that matter, any other country) can afford to implement this as much more than either a tripwire or a very limited area defense protecting a target such as Baghdad. Even when something is detected in either case (with the latter providing a bit more target resolution, but nowhere near enough to guide weapons to target), you still need to find the target with enough accuracy to put weapon on machine, something that the F-117/B-2 WERE designed to deal with. Even though the Serbs were reported to have a similar system, it took a lot of luck and not a little bit of operational stupidity for them to score ONE F-117.
Which will be detected and targeted. If the Hussein Channel tower is still operating when everything around it has no power, I trust the Jedis in the USAF to realize that they're not running reruns of a soccer match.
TV and cell are either VHF or UHF which are "line of sight"
(except for rare skip.)
Transmissions from other nations would have to be within that "line of sight" distance to be effective.
To compute the location, (in relationship to the receiver,)
of a moving object reflecting a stationary transmitters signal
would be easy compared to computing the location,
(in relationship to the receiver,) of a moving object
reflecting a signal from another moving object.
The location of the transmitter (AWACS, etc) could be
determined by a active radar, but lighting up a USAF AWACS platform
is akin to standing in the middle of Paris Island yelling "Jarheads are fags."
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