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Turkey has agreed to buy Russia's advanced missile-defence system, leaving NATO wondering what's next

CHRISTOPHER WOODY Published: JUL 18, 2017, 3:48 AM

Turkey reached an agreement with Russia to purchase the latter’s most sophisticated missile-defence system, the S-400, a senior Turkish military official told Bloomberg last week.

Under the $US2.5 billion agreement Ankara would receive two batteries of the antiaircraft missile from Moscow within the coming year and then produce two more batteries in Turkey.

At the beginning of June, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Moscow was ready to deliver the missile system, and a Russian military-industry official said an agreement on technical details had been reached in mid-June.

Turkey stepped up efforts to acquire its own missile-defence system after the US, Germany, and the Netherlands — all NATO members — decided at the end of 2015 not to renew their Patriot-missile deployments in southern Turkey. Spanish andItalian missile batteries remain in the country, but those systems are linked to the NATO air-defence system.

The deal has not been finalised and could still fall through, as has happened before — under pressure from the US, Turkey scrapped plans to buy missiles from a Chinese state-run company that had been sanctioned for allegedly selling missiles to Iran. (Ankara has also sought out alternative missile systems from the US andFrance.)

But the agreement has deepened concern that Turkey is drifting away from its longstanding alliance in NATO, which it joined during the security bloc’s first enlargement in 1952.

The S-400 deal “is a clear sign that Turkey is disappointed in the US and Europe,” Konstantin Makienko, an analyst at Moscow-based think tank the Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies, told Bloomberg. “But until the advance is paid andthe assembly begins, we can’t be sure of anything.”

“The problem is, how do you interoperate in the NATO system with Russians? They will never interoperate,” US Defence Secretary James Mattis told reporters on Friday. “We’ll have to see — does it go through? Do they actually employ it? Do they employ it only in one area? All that kind of stuff. But you know, we’ll have to take a look at it.”