Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has promised that the military will
receive 1,500 new planes and helicopters and 200 new systems of air defense
before 2020.
Vladimir Putin held a meeting at the Sukhoi Corporation on the problems
of a state defense order for the Air Force that determines that 1,500 new
planes and helicopters and 200 new air defense systems will be acquired for the
Army under the new arms programme that lasts until 2020. That will bring the portion
of modern aircrafts in the Air Force to 80% and modern air defense systems to
75% of the total number. The prime minister said that since the beginning of
the crisis the aviation industry and the production of air defense systems
received government support in the
amount of 95 billion roubles, of which 34.6 billion roubles will be made
available to the Unified Aircraft Building Corporation, 30 billion roubles to
the company MIG and 11 billion roubles to Oboronprom. This year, the prime minister
said, the industry will deliver 27 planes, more than 50 helicopters and five
S-400 anti-aircraft missile complexes to the Army. There is background to this
meeting. In September 2009, President Dmitry Medvedev conducted a meeting at
the engineering company in Reutovo near Moscow;
at this meeting the chief of the General Staff Nikolai Makarov made sensational
declarations about the inferior quality of weapons attained for the Russian armed
forces, an official from the Defense Ministry says. In the wake of this meeting,
the president told the prime minister to hold meetings on specific sectors of
the defense industry. Vladimir Putin held such meetings on the Navy at the
Admiralty Shipyard in Petersburg, on the land
forces armaments at Uralvagonzavod in Nizhniy Tagil,
on communications technology at the Sozvezdiye plant in Voronezh, on artillery and missiles at the
engineering office in Kolomenskoye and on space systems at Energomash in
Khimki. The meeting at Sukhoi completes the series of meetings, a source at United
Aircraft Building Corporation (OAK) says.
The aviation industry is the best
performing segment of the defense industry, says Igor Korochenko, member of the
Citizens' Council at the Defense Ministry and Sukhoi is the leading enterprise
in the entire defense industry.
Alexei Nikolsky
