Putin Lifts Ban on Russian Missile Sales to Iran

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/14/world/europe/putin-lifts-ban-on-russian-missile-sales-to-iran.html

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MOSCOW — President Vladimir V. Putin on Monday approved the delivery of a sophisticated air defense missile system to Iran, potentially complicating negotiations on Tehran’s nuclear program and further straining ties with Washington.

The sale could also undermine the Obama administration’s efforts to sell Congress and foreign allies on the nuclear deal, which Iran and the United States are still struggling to complete. It might also reduce the United States’ leverage in the talks by making it much harder for the United States or Israel to mount airstrikes against Iran’s nuclear infrastructure if the country ignored such an agreement.

“It is significant as it complicates the calculus for planning any military option involving airstrikes,” said David A. Deptula, a retired three-star general who served as the Air Force’s deputy chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.

The deal, worth an estimated $800 million to Russia, also reinforced Israeli and Arab fears that a nuclear pact and the subsequent lifting of sanctions would ignite the Iranian economy, making it a more formidable regional power.

No timetable was announced for delivering the weapons, S-300 surface-to-air missiles. The sale was suspended five years ago amid a flurry of United Nations sanctions against the Islamic republic.

Sergey V. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, said that far from complicating the continuing negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program the missile sales would help them along.

“It was done in the spirit of good will in order to encourage progress in the talks,” Mr. Lavrov said in a televised statement. “We believe that the need for this kind of embargo, indeed a separate, voluntary Russian embargo, has completely disappeared.”

The missile deal does not pose a threat to Israel, Mr. Lavrov said, emphasizing that the S-300 is a defensive weapon.

The five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council and Germany have been negotiating with Iran for years to try to make sure that its nuclear program remains peaceful.

The broad framework of a deal reached in Lausanne, Switzerland, on April 2 was preliminary, with several difficult issues still to be resolved by a June 30 deadline, including the pace at which sanctions should be lifted. The last thing proponents of the deal want to see is a rush to shower benefits on Iran before the final agreement is reached.

Along with congressional Republicans, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has been sharply critical of the nuclear deal, saying that although it would free Iran from debilitating economic sanctions, it would do nothing to stop the country from getting a nuclear weapon.

On Monday, his intelligence minister, Yuval Steinitz, issued a statement saying the deal showed that “the economic momentum in Iran that will come in the wake of lifting the sanctions will be exploited for armaments and not used for the welfare of the Iranian people.”

Iran, he added, “is being allowed to arm itself with advanced weapons that will only increase its aggression.”

White House officials repeated the administration’s objections to the missile sale, noting that Secretary of State John Kerry had expressed those concerns recently to Mr. Lavrov.

“I’m not in a position to speculate on the decision-making process that Russia is engaged in right now,” said Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary. “But I do think it’s safe to say that Russia understands that the United States certainly takes very seriously the safety and security of our allies in the region.”

Mr. Earnest also said the administration was concerned about the possibility that Russia could enter into a deal with Iran to barter food for oil that could raise “potential sanctions concerns.”

“We’ll obviously evaluate these two proposals moving forward,” Mr. Earnest said. “We’ve been in direct touch with Russia to make sure that they understand — and they do — the potential concerns we have.”

Mr. Lavrov, alluding to recent airstrikes by Saudi Arabia and others against Iranian allies in Yemen, suggested that Iran needed a more robust air defense system. “For Iran, which is located in the volatile Middle East region, a modern air defense system is very important, especially now that tensions have run high in the surrounding environment,” he said.

Mr. Lavrov also noted that Moscow could use the money. The Russian economy, battered by a steep drop in the price of oil and by Western sanctions imposed over Moscow’s actions on behalf of separatists in Ukraine, is expected to fall into a recession this year.

Russia has been aggressively seeking new trade partners to prove that Western sanctions have not isolated it from the global economy. Although the full details have not been disclosed, the Russian news media reported that Moscow had negotiated an oil-for-goods exchange with Iran that would involve acquiring some 500,000 barrels of Iranian oil a day in exchange for Russian equipment and goods. Iran has long been one of the main buyers of Russian wheat, for example.

“We need to think about the future of our trade partnership,” said Andrei A. Klimov, the deputy chairman of the foreign relations committee in the Federation Council, Russia’s Senate. “We don’t want to wait for anybody else. It is a kind of competition, if you like.”

Since resuming the presidency in 2012, Mr. Putin has worked to restore some of the great-power status Russia lost with the disintegration of the Soviet Union, not least by cultivating relations with countries hostile to the United States, like Venezuela and, to some extent, China. Cultivating Iran fits into that pattern.

For Russia, “it is always good to have some third world countries hostile to the West, hostile to America,” said Georgy I. Mirsky of the Institute of World Economy and International Relations, who is one of Russia’s leading Middle East analysts.

Even if an eventual nuclear agreement drives some degree of reconciliation between the West and Iran, the early lifting of the missile deal signals that “Russia will always be a really loyal partner and, if not an ally, at least a friend of Iran,” he said.

Not surprisingly, Iran praised the move as an important step toward improved relations.

“If Russia fulfills its commitment to deliver the S-300 missile system to Iran, it will be a step towards boosting the relations and collaborations between the two countries,” Iran’s deputy defense minister, Reza Talaei-Nik, told the semiofficial Tasnim News Agency on Monday. “It will be a step forward.”

There was some debate as to just how much the missiles would improve Iran’s military capabilities.

The five S-300 squadrons cannot shield all of Iran’s nuclear facilities, said Simon Saradzhyan, an expert on arms control and Russia at Harvard University’s Belfer Center, while noting that Russia just sold China the more sophisticated S-400 system. The official Tass news agency reported that in February Moscow offered Tehran an air defense system more modern than the S-300, but that no decision had been made.

Still, military experts said the highly capable S-300 system would make it much harder for the United States or Israel to stage airstrikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Although Iran denies that it is using its civilian nuclear program to mask efforts to build a bomb, many Western countries are dubious. And Israel has made no secret of its willingness to consider a military strike to halt Iran’s progress, though it is not known to possess bunker-buster bombs powerful enough to destroy all of Iran’s bomb-making capacity.

More than missile systems, what Iran really needs is to escape the principal financial and economic sanctions, the ones that cut off substantial trade and access to much of the world’s banking system, Mr. Saradzhyan said.