Arms Expo Off to Inauspicious Start
By Lyuba Pronina -- Staff Writer -- Moscow Times
NIZHNY TAGIL, Ural Mountains -- The weeklong Russian Expo Arms-2002 -- a forum for weapon-makers to show off their goods to foreign buyers -- got off to a bad start Tuesday after a visitor was wounded during a rocket launch.
Yevgeny Boyarsky, 48, was hit in the stomach by shrapnel from a shell during a demonstration of the Smerch multi-launch rocket system. He was rushed to a local hospital.
Zinovy Pak, director of the Russia's Munitions Agency, said he could not remember ever seeing such an accident. A special commission will investigate, he added.
The Smerch was meant to be one of the show-stoppers at the exhibition.
Made by the Perm-based Motovilikhinskiye Plants, the system has been used by the domestic armed forces since 1987 and has been exported to Kuwait and Algeria.
The exhibition, which runs until Saturday, continued after the accident.
T-90C, T-80UK and T-72M1 battle tanks, BMP-3 infantry combat vehicles and tank-support vehicles paraded on the 50-kilometer-long firing range, the largest in the country, shooting at simulated targets and driving through a 5-meter-deep pool.
"Everything that we see and hear cannot but help make an impression on our potential customers," said Andrei Belyaninov, head of Rosoboronexport, the state-owed arms exporting agency. He said, however, that "contracts are not normally signed during exhibitions."
Rosoboronexport, which accounts for 90 percent of arms exports, scooped up more than $2 billion in revenues in the first half of 2002 and hopes to surpass $4 billion by the end of the year. Russia received $4.4 billion in revenues for arms exports last year.
Of the foreign visitors present at the exhibition, some were inspecting technology they already own, while others were surveying the competition.
"We would like to see what our competitors look like," Lieutenant Colonel John Paulson of the U.S. Abrams Tank System said.
"It's always interesting to see the arms displays, the mobility demonstration, the firepower demonstration. ... The T-90 and T-80 are very good tanks, we have a lot of respect for them," he said. "We are always interested to see what the Russians are doing."
Munusamy Kandasamy of the Indian Defense Ministry said that he came to the exhibition with a group of colleagues to look at the T-90C battle tank.
"We were impressed by its performance in all aspects," Kandasamy said.
India signed a $750 million deal last year with Rosoboronexport under which 124 of the tanks are to be delivered by Nizhny Tagil-based Uralvagonzavod, while another 186 tanks assembled at a factory in the city of Avadi.
India is so far the only foreign customer to have purchased the tank.
Uralvagonzavod, one of the country's largest tank makers, also is hoping to modernize the T-72 combat tank.
The modernized T-72M1 version approaches the combat capabilities of the T-90C, said Uralvagonzavod general director Nikolai Malykh, who added that preliminary discussions are under way with potential clients.
Uralvagonzavod is hoping to modernize the vast majority of the 15,000 T-72 tanks still in operation. Some 30,000 such tanks were produced. Full modernization should cost up to $2 million per tank, Malykh said.
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