US military team set to inspect Russian radar in Azerbaijan

Baku (AFP): A US military team will visit ex-Soviet Azerbaijan on Tuesday to inspect Russia's Gabala radar station, touted by Moscow as a potential alternative to controversial missile defence sites in central Europe.

The Pentagon delegation will visit the station, about 200 kilometres (125 miles) from the Azerbaijani capital Baku, in the company of Azerbaijani and Russian military experts.

Brigadier General Patrick O'Reilly, deputy director of the US Missile Defence Agency, will head the six-person team, said a US official in Baku speaking on condition of anonymity.

"What we'll be looking at is to what extent this facility can be part of a future missile defence system," the US official said. "The idea is definitely being taken seriously."

Major General Alexander Yakushin, the deputy head of Russia's space forces, said on Saturday that three-way consultations will also be held on Tuesday between Azerbaijani, Russian and US officials in Baku.

"Our main goal in these consultations is to suspend the expansion of the missile defence system into eastern Europe," he told journalists in Moscow.

But the US official said no formal talks were planned.

"These are not negotiations," he said. "It is basically a technical visit to get a tour of the facility."

Russia's ambassador to Azerbaijan, Vasily Istratov, told a briefing in Baku that the visit will be followed by missile defence talks between top Russian and US officials at a meeting tentatively set for October.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has proposed using the Gabala radar station as an alternative host for elements of a US missile defence system planned for central Europe.

Moscow says the US plan to build a radar in the Czech Republic and anti-missile interceptors in Poland threatens Russian security. It has accused Washington of building a "new Berlin Wall" and threatened to re-deploy nuclear missiles if the US forges ahead with the plan.

Azerbaijan borders Iran, one of the countries that Washington says it needs to protect itself against.

However, Russia is only offering Gabala's radar facility and has never said it could host missile interceptors.

Numerous US officials have expressed skepticism about using the Gabala station, including Henry Obering, the chief of the Missile Defence Agency, who said last month that it is too close to Iran to be effective.

But experts saw the upcoming visit as a sign that Washington isn't dismissing the offer out of hand.

"I was surprised to hear about the visit," said Philip Coyle, a missile defence expert at the Washington-based Centre for Defence Information. "They're at least going through the motions of considering it."

Coyle said the US military may be considering alternatives to building facilities in eastern Europe in the wake of US Congress votes to reduce missile defence funding and growing public opposition to the plan in the Czech Republic.

The fact that US President George W. Bush, who has pushed hard for the missile defence sites in central Europe, is leaving office next year may be another factor, he said.

"(The US military) may be hedging its bets," Coyle said. "The next president may want to try to reach a deal with the Russians."

A hulking 16-storey concrete slab set in the mountains of northern Azerbaijan, the Gabala station was put into operation in 1984 as one of the most powerful radars in the Soviet Union's missile attack early warning system.

Gabala feeds a steady stream of information to installations in Moscow and has a range of 6,000 kilometres (3,700 miles), capable of monitoring the Middle East, Asia and parts of Africa.

Following the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, the Azerbaijani government agreed to lease the station to Russia until 2012.

Experts have raised doubts that the station's Soviet-era technology could work with any US missile defense systems, but Yakushin said the Russian military would be willing to upgrade the facility.

"If there is a political decision on sharing the Gabala radar station, we are ready to modernize it to fit the needs of our American partners," he said.