(Financial Times-UK) Kathrin Hille - Russia says it will not deliver high-end, S-300 air defense missiles to Iran in the near future, despite last month lifting an embargo on delivering such weapons. "The right time to make such deliveries has not yet come," Yevgeny Lukyanov, deputy head of Russia's security council, said on Tuesday. Iran's defense minister Hossein Dehghan said on a visit to Moscow last month that he expected the S-300 contract to be reviewed within a month and deliveries to happen before the end of this year. But Sergei Ryabkov, Russia's deputy foreign minister, said talking about a schedule would be "not just premature but very wrong." Oleg Bochkaryov, deputy head of Russia's military-industrial commission, said that Moscow would not supply S-300 missiles to Iran from its stocks but build new ones instead. "That means a delay to be measured not in months but possibly in years," said a person close to the defense ministry.
2015-05-27 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive