DUSHANBE, April 16, 2015, Asia-Plus – In a statement delivered at the 4th Moscow internationals security conference, Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu noted on April 16 that Russia will continue strengthening its outpost – Russian military base – in Tajikistan.
On the situation in Afghanistan, Russian Defense Minister noted that the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in the country had failed to cope with the task.
“Terrorism in Afghanistan is not eradicated, and the flow of narcotics increased. All this represents a real threat to Russia”s neighbors, first of all, to our allies in Central Asia,” Shoiqu was quoted as saying by the Russian Defense Ministry’s website.
In this regard, he said that Russia will continue providing Tajikistan with arms and military hardware as well as strengthening the Russian military base in the country.
We will recall that Russian business daily
Kommersant
reported in early April that in response to the “Islamic State (IS) threat,” Russia reportedly pledged to supply 70 billion rubles of weapons and military equipment to Tajikistan.
Kommersant
quoted anonymous officials on the Russian General Staff as saying that military aid to Tajikistan to counter IS could reach up to 70 billion rubles and could include weapons, ammunition, aircraft, artillery systems and weapons — much of it secondhand hardware from the Russian army.
Speaking at the conference, the Russian defense minister drew the attention of the audience to “Iranian problem”. Sergey Shoigu underlined that Teheran missile threat was not confirmed.
“It is clear now that mythical Tehran missile threat imagined by USA and allied countries was a simple flannelling,” said the Russian Minister of Defense.
He also noted that the build-up of the US missile defense system threatens the strategic stability in the world.
“Our forecasts for the global missile defense system of the United States, stated at the Moscow Conference of 2012, are being proved to be correct. We affirm that the American missile defense’s architecture embodied in the life is a threat to strategic stability,” said Shoigu.
The Russian defense minister also pointed to the necessity of joining efforts in the fight against any attempts to glorify Nazism.
He also noted that Ukraine suffered the most in the string of “color revolutions” around the world, which only keeps expanding.
“The color revolution phenomenon is continuing to develop and is becoming global…Of course, the biggest tragedy in the string of color revolutions is Ukraine,” Shoigu said.
The minister referred to mass protests in Venezuela and Hong Kong last year as “links of the same chain” with the 2014 coup in Ukraine.
