Category: Russia

This is Not at All Surprising

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We are now seeing reports that the word “Peacekeeper” is being painted on the sides of Russian military vehicles near the Ukrainian boarder:

But there’s some frightening evidence that Moscow intends to invade mainland Ukraine.

“The probability of invasion is much, much higher than it has ever been,” James Miller, managing editor of The Interpreter, told War is Boring in an e-mail. The Interpreter translates media from the Russian press and blogosphere into English for use by analysts and policymakers.

The Russians reportedly have moved military vehicles with “peacekeeping” insignia to the border—a first since the crisis in the Ukraine began. Earlier this month, NATO warned that the Russians could mount an incursion into Ukrainian territory under the guise of a peacekeeping mission.

The Interpreter reports that it has found several pictures and a video showing Russian armored vehicles bearing the insignia “MC,” an abbreviation of the Russian words mirotvorcheskiye sily or “peacekeeping force.”

Given that the Ukranian military appears to be ramping up an already indiscriminate artillery barrage on Donetsk, it I would not be at all surprised seeing some sort of “peacekeeping” operation or “no fly zone” from the Kremlin.

Su-25 Attack Aircraft Production May Resume

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I do not see a big export market, so I gotta figure that new production is intended for use in what the Russians call the “Near Abroad”, and what Americans call the “Former Soviet Union”:

The Ulan-Ude Aviation Plant (UUAP) may resume the production of Sukhoi Su-25 fighter jets, the plant’s managing director Leonid Belykh said.

“We used to produce the Su-25 jets and today our equipment is still in good condition, so the question is under consideration. Some serious investment will be needed, and it is likely that another factory will take up the production. But if the government orders us to do it, we shall do it. If the production is to be transferred to somebody else, so be it,” Belykh told RIA Novosti.

Su-25 is a heavily armored subsonic strike attack aircraft designed for the close air support of ground forces in daytime and at night, the targets being within visible range. It is also used for the support of installations with given coordinates on a 24-hour basis in all weather conditions.

To be clear, this is not a formal request from Moscow, but rather a sales pitch made to Moscow from a defense plant.

Still, it does say something about the mindset on the side of both Russia’s defense industry and Russia’s military.

A Bit of Analysis on the Probable Shoot Down in the Ukraine

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Putin’s Flight Route from Sao Paulo to Moscow, and MS-12 MH17’s Route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur


Buk Missile Launcher


50 Km Radius about Snizhe (Red) where Launcher was Reported, and the crash site in Grabovo (Hrabove) (Blue)

Click for Popup Slide Show

What we know right now is that the Malaysian Airlines Flight 12 crashed in the Ukraine, and that it was very likely shot down by a medium of heavy surface to air missile (SAM).  (The aircraft was at about 10,000m, well above the range of light SAMs and AAA)

RT (obvious caveats apply) is noting that Putin’s presidential transport crossed paths with the airliner not that long before the shoot-down: (See map)

“I can say that Putin’s plane and the Malaysian Boeing intersected at the same point and the same echelon. That was close to Warsaw on 330-m echelon at the height of 10,100 meters. The presidential jet was there at 16:21 Moscow time and the Malaysian aircraft – 15:44 Moscow time,” a source told the news agency on condition of anonymity.

I don’t know what exactly happened and why, but I’m inclined that the regular Russian military would not be pointing anything into the air bigger than a water pistol until Putin’s plane was on the ground.

I’ve checked a couple of sources online, and it appears that timing is as close as RT describes.

I think that RT is implying that  it was the part of an attempted assassination against Putin, but I am calling BS on that.

Furthermore, I plotted a great circle route from Sao Paulo to Moscow (below, attached), which would appear to indicate that the Putin’s aircraft and aircraft would have come close to MH17’s flight path.

Given the timing, it is hard to imagine that anyone in the Russian military was allowed to point anything skyward more potent than a water pistol.

Ukrainian sources are alleging that a Buk missile launcher was used to shoot down the aircraft, and it should be noted that the Ukrainian rebels did capture some of these systems:

Ukrainian official said Thursday that Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, a passenger jet traveling from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, was shot down near Snizhe today, a town close to the Ukrainian-Russian border. The plane was carrying 295 people and crashed early evening, local time.

 No one has claimed responsibility for the attack, but immediate reports say that the airplane was grounded by a Buk surface-to-air missile system. The Buk, developed by the Soviet Union in 1979, has remained widely in use throughout the former Soviet states, including Ukraine.

 General Philip Breedlove, the commander of the U.S. European Command, said that Moscow has been supplying Ukrainian separatists with anti-aircraft weaponry, and has held training sessions along the eastern Ukrainian border, teaching rebels how to operate the systems.

 Direct supply of the Buk from Moscow to rebels would be a major escalation in the ongoing conflict. However, on June 29, Russia’s official news agency, ITAR-TASS, reported that pro-Russian separatists took a Buk system under their control. The report does not specify whether or not this was theft from the Russian or Ukrainian militaries, only that the rebels had seized control of the weapons system. An AP report, dated yesterday, noted that, “A launcher similar to the Buk missile system was seen by Associated Press journalists near the eastern Ukrainian town of Snizhne, which is held by pro-Russia rebels, earlier Thursday.”

As I noted the Buk fires the SA-11 (30km range) or the SA-17 (50km range).

The crash location is given as Grabovo (Hrabove), though, given the physics of the situation, the impact point could be anywhere from 10 to 100 km east northeast of that.  (See map)

Assuming that it was a missile, my opinion  is that the rebels are the most likely perps, followed by the Ukrainian armed forces or irregulars, with the Russian military a distant third.

I would also note that while it does appear that the rebels captured the missiles from the Ukrainian military, I cannot see them being able to operate the system without extensive training by Russian military of the FSB.

Another Example of the US Failure in Iraq

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In response to the advance of ISIS, the Iraqi military has taken an emergency deliveries of Su-25 ground attack fighters:

A video uploaded by the Iraqi Ministry of Defence and a subsequent announcement shed light on Iraq’s first success in acquiring a combat capable platform to stop the advance of the Islamic State. The latter has made great progress in capturing large areas of Iraq and is now slowly advancing to Iraq’s capital Baghdad.

”The Ministry of Defence announced the arrival of the first out of five Russian combat aircraft Su-25 into Iraqi territory under a contract with the Russian ministry, which will contribute to increasing the combat capability of the Air Force and the other branches of the armed forces to eliminate terrorism.”

The Iraqi Army and Air Force have proved anything but capable to halt the Islamic State’s advance and have been desperately looking for other ways to fill the caps currently posed in Iraqi’s Armed Forces. With the United States reluctant to provide close air support or speeding up the delivery of Iraq’s F-16s, Iraq has been increasingly looking to countries in Eastern Europe to strengthen the Iraqi Air Force (IQAF). It is now clear a batch of five ex-Russian Su-25s are the first to have arrived.

The first Su-25, still in Russian Air Force (RuAF) camouflage and with a hastily applied Iraqi flag, arrived onboard a Russian An-124-100 cargo plane together with ground support equipment on the 28th of June. The Su-25s are believed to have been stored at the Aircraft Repair Plant 121 (ARZ 121) in Kubinka before being flown to Iraq. The contract also included new engines for the aircraft, which were installed just before the delivery flight.

The Iraqis have been waiting for the delivery of F-16s, but they got these surplus Su-25s in a matter of a few weeks.

It also of note that the Iraq AF operated this under Saddam, and the Iranians operate them today, so there is operational experience that can be tapped.

Additionally, under the current tactical situation, it’s a better weapon system than the F-16, because what is needed is a dedicated close air support (CAS) and strike aircraft with low operational costs.

What’s more the aircraft’s agility at low speed and low altitude allows it to maximize the effect of unguided munitions, which comprise the bulk of Iraqi munitions.

Additionally, it constitutes a major change in Iraqi policy. It shows that they are moving away from Western weapon systems, and the US defense contractors. (Yet another goal of Bush/Cheney that has turned into a fail)

So, the failure of the Neocon’s Iraq adventure continues to damage the interests of the United States.

Your Ukraine Update

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We now have some on the ground media reports that make it very likely that US security consultants (mercenaries) are on the ground in the Ukraine:

The leaks may have more truth in them than I had assumed. Paris Match, a well regarded weekly French magazine, investigated the recent incidents in Krasnoarmeysk in east Ukraine where some para-military gang disrupted the vote on more autonomy for the region by killing two supporters of the federalists. It finds photographic evidence that the gang was led by functionary from the fascists paramilitary Right Sektor:

These images show Andrey Denisenko, one of the Pravy Sektor chiefs, among a group of mysterious gunmen that attacked a voting station Sunday in the small town of Krasnoarmeysk, some 60 kilometres from the separatist « capital », Donetsk. After occupying the local town hall for several hours, the militiamen shot down point blank one local civilian, and killed two other unarmed protesters.

These Pravy Sektor thugs were hired for the “special battalion Denjpr” of the newly created “National Guard” and are paid by oligarch Ihor Kolomoyskyi.

 But there is an even bigger scoop in this story.

 Jerome Sessini, an experienced war photographer for Magnum who has worked in Iraq, Afghanistan and other places, was in Krasnoarmeysk and made some very interesting observations:

Several witness also said they heard some of the gunmen speaking with strong western Ukraine accents. They also noticed that some of the gunmen appeared to come from the Caucasus area, possibly mercenaries from Chechnya. Other gunmen never spoke a word and seemed foreign to the region. French war photographer Jerome Sessini spent about an hour face to face with the gunmen before they opened fire. « I found that their general attitude and their very precise techniques gave off the impression that they were American mercenaries, or people trained by American mercenaries » said Sessini. « I can’t guarantee this for sure, but I’d give it a 95 per cent, » added the photographer, who frequently interacted with various U.S. security contractors during his years covering the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

A long time ago, when I took part in martial arts competitions, I could tell which dojo my opponents had learned at just by watching their warming up rituals. Someone who’s longtime profession is to observe, identify and document people at war should surely be able to categorize special forces he interacted with along the “schooling” and attitude those have.

Also you have to read this essay by Michael Hudson on the underlying motivations for US and EU adventurism in the Ukraine, where asserts the program of destabilization and austerity (austerity being the EU/IMF deal that Yanukovich rejected):

Finance in today’s world has become war by non-military means. Its object is the same as that of military conquest: appropriation of land and basic infrastructure, and the rents that can be extracted as tribute. In today’s world this is taken mainly in the form of debt service and privatization. That is how neoliberalism works, subduing economies by indebting their governments and using unpayably high debts as a lever to pry away the public domain at distress prices. It is what today’s New Cold War is all about. Backed by the IMF and European Central Bank (ECB) as knee-breakers in what has become in effect a financial extension of NATO, the aim is for U.S. and allied investors to appropriate the plums that kleptocrats have taken from the public domain of Russia, Ukraine and other post-Soviet economies in these countries, as well as whatever assets remain.

He then a suggestion of how to fix this:

The cure for a rent-seeking oligarchy is to tax away rent seeking and de-privatize public monopolies. What Ukraine’s kleptocrats have taken (and what foreign investors seek to extract) can be recovered by promoting classical progressive policies taxing land and natural resources, regulating monopolies and providing public infrastructure investment, including a public option for banking and other basic services. That is what drove the U.S. and Western European industrial takeoffs, after all.

When reading Hudson’s essay, I realized something:  the role of international finance as a hostile colonizing is not just limited to the former Soviet Union, or 3rd nations.

When we look at Wall Street, and the City of London, they aren’t just business interests who are f%$#ing up our economy.   They are an occupying colonial power all over the world, which while far less mellifluous than Matt Taibbi’s term, “Vampire Squid,” is a better description.

One only needs to look at things like Timken’s Wall Street driven spin off of its steel business (which will eliminate a core competency in its bearing business) to see how the policies of deindustrialization and looting are being applied here.

Wall Street is not just a corrupt and corrupting part of our economy, it is an invading colonial force.

I Have Mixed Emotions About This

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In response to American sanctions, the Russian Duma passed legislation, ostensibly to secure the actions of foreign bankers.

The result is that the Russian government is now demanding that Visa and Mastercard make a security deposit equivalent to 2 days worth of transactions, $3.8 billion, to continue to operate in the country:

International credit card companies face a “severe impact” on their operations in Russia following a strict new law Moscow has adopted in response to Visa and Mastercard freezing service to banks under US sanctions.

Visa described the regulations as “unprecedented” and Mastercard said it could experience difficulties, the Russian magazine Snob reported, after Vladimir Putin signed a law on Monday to create a rival national payment system.

The law stipulates the creation of a homegrown system to facilitate cashless transactions by 1 July, but also imposes stiff new requirements on international payment systems operating in Russia.

The legislation was spurred on by Visa and Mastercard’s decision on 21 March to stop servicing payments for clients of Rossiya Bank, as well as its daughter company Sobinbank. Rossiya Bank was included in the first round of US sanctions over the Ukraine crisis because it is owned by Putin associate Yury Kovalchuk and is the “personal bank for senior officials of the Russian Federation,” the US Treasury said when announcing the sanctions.

Visa and Mastercard also blocked operations for cards issued by SMP Bank, which is owned by the brothers Arkady and Boris Rotenberg, who are old judo buddies of Putin’s.

The new law forbids international payment systems from cutting off services to Russian clients and obliges them to base their processing centre in Russia. To ensure their good behaviour, international operators will have to place a security deposit in Russia’s central bank equal to the average value of two days’ worth of transactions.

Visa and Mastercard together processed $1.9bn (£1.12bn) in transactions per day last year – 90% of all cashless payments in Russia – equal to a $3.8bn security deposit, the Moscow Times reported.

The security deposit will be due in eight quarterly payments starting on 1 July. The law states that if a payment system unilaterally freezes operations for a Russian client, it is liable for a fee totalling 10% of its security deposit for each day without service.

The credit cards are caught between a rock and a hard place, they have to deal with both US and Russian law, which sucks for them, but they are credit card companies, which means that they spend their time giving people sh%$ sandwichs, so the fact that they are dining on excrement between two slices of white bread, it amuses me no end..

Like I said, mixed emotions.

I’m Not Sure What it Means, but It Sounds Promising

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Vladimir Putin has suggested that any referendum on autonomy/secession for the eastern Ukraine be delayed:

The Kremlin beat a tactical retreat over a regional referendum following days of soaring tension that have left dozens dead and fed fears of a civil war in Ukraine.

Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, said the referendum being staged by pro-Russia separatists in parts of eastern Ukraine on Sunday should be postponed. If the referendum goes ahead, it will provide an argument for the region joining Russia as happened in Crimea in March.

Overt Russian support for the plebiscite could have triggered more substantive EU and US sanctions against Russia. Putin’s statement, following talks with the president of Switzerland in Moscow, looked likely to delay the imposition of a harsher round of economic penalties.

While Moscow has also opposed the holding of presidential elections in Ukraine on 25 May – a ballot strongly supported by the west – Putin sounded more conciliatory, saying that the poll could be a step in the right direction.

The Russian leader insisted, however, that a presidential election should be preceded by constitutional changes in Ukraine aimed at federalising the country and handing greater powers to the regions, steps that would favour greater Russian influence over eastern Ukraine after the Kremlin annexed Crimea.

I don’t know what it means, but it is rather telling the first time that I’ve seen a statement, from either side that seems to be the slightest bit directed toward a deescalation.

With Obama sounding intensely bellicose, and John Kerry channeling General Jack Ripper from the movie Dr. Strangelove, it appears that Putin is the adult in the room.

We live in Bizarro World.

I Hope that He Has Some ITEOD Arrangements

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Edward Snowden has told the The New York Times that he no longer has copies of any of his files:

Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor, said in an extensive interview this month that he did not take any secret N.S.A. documents with him to Russia when he fled there in June, assuring that Russian intelligence officials could not get access to them.

Mr. Snowden said he gave all of the classified documents he had obtained to journalists he met in Hong Kong, before flying to Moscow, and did not keep any copies for himself. He did not take the files to Russia “because it wouldn’t serve the public interest,” he said.

“What would be the unique value of personally carrying another copy of the materials onward?” he added.

He also asserted that he was able to protect the documents from China’s spies because he was familiar with that nation’s intelligence abilities, saying that as an N.S.A. contractor he had targeted Chinese operations and had taught a course on Chinese cybercounterintelligence.

“There’s a zero percent chance the Russians or Chinese have received any documents,” he said.

American intelligence officials have expressed grave concern that the files might have fallen into the hands of foreign intelligence services, but Mr. Snowden said he believed that the N.S.A. knew he had not cooperated with the Russians or the Chinese. He said he was publicly revealing that he no longer had any agency documents to explain why he was confident that Russia had not gained access to them. He had been reluctant to disclose that information previously, he said, for fear of exposing the journalists to greater scrutiny.

I hope that he has made some sort of In The Event of Death (ITEOD) arrangements, because, this otherwise means that if the US and UK state security apparatus can get to Glenn Greenwald and documentarian Laura Poitras, particularly with him leaving the Guardian to move to a new journalistic endeavor funded by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar.

There are a lot of people in our government who are determined to destroy all of them, and to the degree that they are in a fledgling organization, this makes the task easier, because potential blow-back is less.

It’s Official, the Nobel Peace Prize is a Joke

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First, they give the following people Nobel Peace Prizes:

  • Henry Kissinger
  • Barack “Drones ‘R Us” Obama
  • Jimmy Carter (Bought a civil war and plunged Afghanistan into 30+ years of hell just to f%$# with the Soviets).

And now we have the, “International Academy of Spiritual Unity and Cooperation of Peoples of the World,” Nominating Vladimir Putin for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Of course, the Nobel committee has not awarded him the prize, but the fact Russian President “Cuddles” has been nominated does indicate that their credibility is shot.

No this is not The Onion.

Because they Do Not Want to Pay to Get Screwed

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It appears the the Russians are not going to be extending additional credit to Cyprus, nor are they going to drop the interest or extend the loans that they have already made.

Felix Salmon is perplexed:

Paul Murphy, watching Cypriot finance Minister Michael Sarris returning empty-handed from Moscow, says that “Medvedev and co could not have played a worse hand during this crisis — and it’s not immediately clear why”. His point is that the most likely outcome right now — he calls it “popping the red pill” — is that big depositors at Laiki Bank (read: rich Russians) are likely to lose some 40% of their money. Since that will make Russia very unhappy, why is Russia doing nothing to prevent it?

I don’t pretend to understand Russian politics, but this move seems to me to be a classic high-risk, high-aggression play; think of Medvedev as a geopolitical hedge-fund manager or poker player, and it begins to make a bit more sense.

Firstly, it’s worth noting that Russia is actually moving backwards on the amount of help it’s likely to extend to Cyprus. When the bailout plan was first announced, it included Russia extending its existing €2.5 billion loan to the country by five years, as well as reducing that loan’s interest rate. Now, Russia is refusing to agree even to that.
More generally, Russia is taking an absolutist stance with respect to Cyprus. No, we won’t restructure the money you owe us. No, we won’t buy a bank off
you. No, we aren’t interested in your natural-gas reserves. And underlying it all, of course, an unspoken — and all the more powerful for being unspoken — physical threat to any Cypriot who causes powerful Russians to lose billions of euros.

I think, and noted in the comments, that there are a number of motivations for the Russians:

  • Medvedev and Putin believe that Frau Merkel (sound of horses whinnying) will demand a haircut of the Russians under any circumstances, both for political advantage, and because of the natural hostility of former residents of Warsaw Pact nations, who will gladly cut their nose off to spite the Russian face.
  • The second reason is that if the ultra-rich Russia tax evaders get dinged, in the future, they may decide to keep assets in, and pay taxes in Russia, because they see the cost of taxes being less than the cost of an IMF and an EU determine to f%$# them.
  • The third reason is that the Russians have been VERY concerned about their western near-abroad for centuries, it’s where they have been invaded from, and they feel that any expansion of the EU presages and expansion of NATO, which they see as a ring of steel intended to threaten them. If Cyprus, and honest hardworking depositors get boned, it is far less likely that places like the Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, etc. will join the union.

Note that the reasons above are orthogonal, so it might be all of the above.

I do think that any tighter government integration in the EU will have to include some sort of government structure which prevents German hegemony, something like the bicameral structure of the US Congress, because this whole “Germany runs Europe” thing is working about as well as it did the last time.

Russia to Order AN-70 Transports

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The Russian Air Force is planning to order 60 of the transports:

Ukrainian company Antonov together with Russian United Aircraft Corporation will participate in manufacturing Antonov An-70 transport airplanes. Russian defense ministry already placed an order for 60 such machines, USD 67 million apiece. Developed since 1978, An-70 can carry heavier cargo than existing transport planes and land on ill-equipped runways.

An-70 can carry 300 troopers, or 200 injured persons, or 47 tons of freight. Comparably, the closest alternative to An-70 – the Airbus A400M Atlas – can carry 37 tons of cargo. Market price of the Spanish A400M is EUR 145 million, whereas the Ukrainian An-70 costs less than USD 70 million.

Planes An-70 will be produced at JSC Gorbunov Kazan Aviation Production Association in Kazan, Russia. The plane can fly at a speed of 780 kilometers per hour at distances of up to 7,800 kilometers. An-70 is capable of landing on 600-800 meter runways with earth surfaces. Onboard navigation equipment allows the plane to land and takeoff at airports lacking special earth-based equipment.

This is interesting, and not just because it represents a rapprochement between Russian and Ukrainian defense industry.

By almost every metric (except for noise where, the contra rotating props create a racket), it equals the A400M, and if this order is sufficient to make the production line viable, it could be a major headache for EADS.

If Putin Wants Us to Stay in Afghanistan………

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The “Graveyard of Empires”, it’s a pretty good indication that our continuing involvement is not in our benefit:

NATO forces should stay in Afghanistan until their job is done, Russia President Vladimir Putin said on Wednesday, suggesting they should stay beyond a planned withdrawal of most combat troops in 2014.

“It is regrettable that many participants in this operation are thinking about how to pull out of there,” Putin said at a meeting with paratroopers in the Russian city of Ulyanovsk. “They took up this burden and should carry it to the end.”

He isn’t suggesting this because he cares about the Afghan people, and he isn’t suggesting this because it’s in the interest of the US or its NATO allies.

He’s doing this because it places stress on the US military and NATO, and as such it serves to ameliorate the threat that he perceives from them.

Say what you will about Putin, but our best interests is ths last thing that he has on his mind,

A Good Essay on Putin

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Stephen Cohen makes some very good points, like the fact that Russia has become less corrupt, journalists and dissidents are less likely to be murdered, his elections are fairer, etc.

Of course, better and more democratic than Yeltsin is not a tough act to follow.

Yeltsin and his cronies looted the country, splitting the proceeds with western banksters, murdered journalists as a fairly brisk clip, impoverished the nation, literally prostituting many of its citizens, and shelled the parliament when they did not do his bidding.

What he misses though is why the west hates Putin so much. It all comes down to the, “Splitting the proceeds with the western banksters,” bit.

One of the rules of the modern neocolonial finance regime is that finance’s masters of the world get to steal other people’s stuff, and those people never get it back.

Russia

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The bombing is clearly a horrible thing, but I don’t have much to add, though I would suggest that you look at Mark Ames article on Russian stoicism.

The Russian reaction may seem cold, or even heartless, in their reaction, but consider the alternative:

As appalling as it might seem, let’s remember what America’s far more sentimental reaction to 9/11 got us: two disastrous wars, tens of thousands of deaths, and the sorts of police-state measures once thought unimaginable. The difference may be more in our sentimentality than in our brutality.

By simply soldiering on, and letting it roll off your back, it makes it much more difficult for the Terrorists to win.

Wikileaks Founder Julian Assange Has Nothing to Fear from the CIA or FBI

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On the other hand, he would be worried about finding Polonium in his coffee, courtesy of the Russian FSB:

Yesterday, The Daily Beast reported that the National Security Agency is aware that the FSB — the post-Soviet KGB — is closely monitoring Wikileaks, though the U.S. has no “direct evidence” that the Russians are behind the days-long denial-of-service attacks that have brought down the Wikileaks website over and over again.

But why would the Russians care that much? In part, because Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has said that between the leaked cables and other information he got separately, high-level corrupt Russian officials should be worried. And some observers think that Assange’s efforts to expose corruption in Russia could be more harmful to his site and himself than exposing America’s secrets have been. One law enforcement source told The Daily Beast, “The Russians play by different rules,” adding that they would be “ruthless” in their attempts to stop him.

(emphasis mine)

Russian leaders don’t get worried, they get proactive, as in the subject of their concern ends up mailed to his family in a dozen parcel post packages, or they die mysteriously.

Russia Will Not Sell S-300 to Iran

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President Medvedev has announced that the Sale of S-300 surface to air missiles to Iran.

Russia has always taken a minimalist approach to obeying UN sanctions regarding the Iranian nuclear, so this is a big deal, particularly since these missiles, with their 400+ km detection range, end up as a formidable area defense system against conventional aircraft, and a formidable point defense system against stealthy targets, at least to the degree that my wild assed guess regarding detection range are justified.