United States and Canadian embargoes are hindering Turkey’s attempts to sell its domestically-built drones and helicopters to other countries, Burak Bekdil said in an analysis for the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies on Friday.

“Ankara has come up with a corporate legal solution to this problem, but it might fail to overcome the political impetus behind the export restrictions,” Bekdil said.

He cited the $1.5 billion deal Turkey reached with Pakistan to sell 30 of its T129 ATAK helicopters, which Bekdil points out are “allegedly indigenous but in fact produced under an Italian-British license”.

That sale, one of Turkey’s biggest arms deal ever, was blocked by Washington as the T129 is powered by two LHTEC T800-4A turboshaft engines, which was built by a joint venture between U.S. company Honeywell and the British company Rolls-Royce. Consequently, Turkey needs U.S. export licenses if it wants to export the domestically-built helicopter.

Turkey, which Bekdil described as “desperate” to make its T129 sale to Pakistan, offered Islamabad a $1.5 billion credit line in 2017. Last March, Pakistan agreed to extend the deal for another six months in hopes it can acquire an export license from Washington.

Citing U.S. sanctions on Turkey’s arms industry for the NATO member’s contentious purchase of Russian S-400 air defence missiles, Bekdil said a move was unlikely.

“This is bad news for Turkey’s thriving defence industry – especially at a time when TAI, Turkey’s state-controlled aerospace powerhouse, is close to winning a contract to sell the T129 to the Philippines,” he added.

Turkey is beginning to face similar problems when it comes to export of its locally-built Bayraktar TB2 armed drones, which are becoming popular in several countries. Here again, the problem for Ankara is that key parts of the TB2 consist of foreign-built components.

On April 12, Canada announced it was cancelling 29 military export permits to Turkey, including the Wescam electro-optical sensor cameras built by L3Harris that are used in the TB2 drones, which Bekdil said were “the heart of the whole drone system”.

Canada cancelled the permits after the technology was exported in Turkish drones to Azerbaijan without Ottawa’s permission. The TB2 drones were used to devastating effect in last year’s war between Azerbaijan and Armenia over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region.

Bekdil said that even though Turkish officials sought to downplay the embargo “for domestic propaganda purposes” most buyers and potential buyers of Turkish-built drones want the TB2 “with Canadian sensors, which is no longer a possibility”.

He said it might take years for Turkey’s Aselsan to build fully original CATS electro-optical cameras.

In the meantime, Turkey is hoping to sell TB2s to Morocco, which could then buy the Canadian components separately, Bekdil said. “After all, Canada has embargoed Turkey, not Morocco or the TB-2’s other future buyers.”

“It is true that weapons systems embargoes are imposed on the end-user country, not the producing country,” the analyst said. “In other words, if the U.S. sees no harm in Pakistan (or the Philippines) operating Turkish-made T129 helicopters, it can issue export licenses for the LHTEC T800-4A engine for the Turkish-Pakistani (or Turkish-Philippines) contracts.”

For similar reasons, Bekdil said Canada’s government can vet a deal between Turkey and Morocco over a TB2 drone sale. But at the same “politics is not always based on pure legality”, he added.https://besacenter.org/turkey-arms-embargoes/

That may make the eastern Mediterranean less stable

The Economist: On the southern shore of the Gulf of Izmit, at the Golcuk shipyard, Turkey’s naval future is slowly taking shape. The first of six German-designed submarines lies in the water, after being floated out from its dock in March. The Piri Reis will join the fleet next year; five other Reis-class subs will follow in successive years. It is a triumph for Turkey’s navy—and a headache for Greece.

Over the past year Turkey and Greece, despite both being members of nato, have sparred in the Mediterranean. Their warships collided last summer after Turkey sent a survey vessel into disputed waters. Greece responded by rallying allies in Europe and the Middle East, bought a slew of French warplanes and, in December, announced a doubling of defence spending to €5.5bn ($6.6bn). That, though, is still less than half the Turkish level. Turkey’s navy is bigger and newer. And the Anadolu, a Spanish-designed light aircraft-carrier, is in the final stages of construction.

Source: https://www.economist.com/europe/2021/07/03/german-submarines-are-giving-turkey-an-edge-over-greece

Today at 3 pm, the end of the preliminary investigation into the case of Armen Charchyan [Director of Izmirlian Medical Center, professor] will be announced, meaning the body implementing proceedings has decided to complete the case and send it to the court. This is what advocate Erik Aleksanyan wrote on his Facebook page, adding the following:

“We believe that, in such conditions, it’s clear that there can’t be any other talk about the existence of a ground for arrest that will obstruct investigation (even though there was never any ground) since, according to the body implementing proceedings, all the necessary actions have been performed; in particular, all the witnesses have been interviewed. Consequently, simple logic reminds us that there is no ground for influencing the witnesses at all. At least in the context of this issue, Armen Charchyan can’t continue to be under arrest.”

Charchyan is charged with giving, receiving a bribe to and from voters, violating the ban on charity during elections or obstructing exercise of the free will of voters.

Charchyan doesn’t accept the charge brought against him.

According to an investigator of the Special Investigation Service, if Charchyan stays in liberty, he will hide from the body implementing proceedings and will obstruct investigation into the case.

The court had declared Charchyan’s detention as unlawful. After he was released, he touched upon the criminal case and insisted that it is ‘a phony case’.

Robert Kocharian was born on August 31, 1954, in Stepanakert, Karabakh. He received his secondary education in Stepanakert. He served in the Soviet Army in 1972-74. In 1982, Robert Kocharian graduated from Yerevan Polytechnic Institute’s Electro-Technical Department with honors.

Robert Kocharian started his professional career at Stepanakert’s electro-technical plant in 1971. Having started as a turner, he was later promoted to the post of mechanical engineer. He occupied various posts in Nagorno Karabakh’s youth communist and communist organs from 1980s. In 1989 and the 1990s he was a deputy of Armenia’s Supreme Soviet and member of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. In 1991, Kocharian was elected a deputy of the Nagorno Karabakh Republic’s Supreme Soviet of the first convocation.

From February 1988, Kocharian was one of the political leaders of the Karabakh movement. He was a member of the Krunk organization. After the organization was dissolved, he founded and headed the Miatsum [Unification] organization. He was one of the first to assume the responsibility of creating Nagorno Karabakh’s security and defense structure.

In August 1992, when the Azeri army had occupied half of the Nagorno Karabakh Republic’s territory, Robert Kocharian became Chairman of the State Defense Committee and Prime Minister of the Nagorno Karabakh Republic. The strong will to mobilize all forces and to liberate Artsakh made it possible to shift the course of the military action within a short period of time. File:Robert Kocharian.JPG On December 24, 1994, Robert Kocharian was elected President of the Nagorno Karabakh Republic by the decision of the NKR Supreme Soviet. In November 1998, he once again became President of the Nagorno Karabakh Republic by a popular vote.

On March 20, 1997, Robert Kocharian was appointed to the post of Prime Minister of the Republic of Armenia.

On March 30, 1998, Robert Kocharian was elected President of the Republic of Armenia in early presidential elections.

On March 5, 2003, Robert Kocharian was reelected to the post of the President of the Republic of Armenia.

Robert Kocharian speaks Russian and English. He is married and has three children.

Former leader of the Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs in Germany (DİTİB) Mustafa Keskin has been charged with ‘inciting hostility and hatred’ for offending Jews and Armenians, Ermenihaber reported.

Earlier, an inquest had been launched against the Turkish figure for posting offensive remarks against the Jews and Armenians on social networks, after which he resigned from the position of president of DİTİB in February 2021.

The Administrative Court of Göttingen has charged Keskin with regard to five different publications that he has been making on Facebook and WhatsApp since May 2015. In one of them, Keskin released a photo edit of Pope Paul II and Mehmet Ali Agca who shot the Pope in 1981 in Rome, as well as the photo of Pope Francis with the following comment: “Don’t be surprised, if someone shoots the Pope in the head.” This was released right after Pope Francis called the Armenian Genocide the first genocide of the 20^th century.

New snap elections will most probably be held in Armenia in a year-and-a-half since there will be a demand. This is what second President of Armenia Robert Kocharyan said during the first general assembly of ‘Armenia’ bloc today.

“We won’t let these authorities be at ease since they don’t understand and accept that they are to blame. We’ll show them who is to blame and who needs to be held liable.

‘Armenia’ bloc has become a radical institutional opposition. We will take advantage of all the resources that we have by law. We will restore faith in parliamentary opposition. The government has two ways out of the situation. Either they continue to persecute members of the opposition and take actions that are in the interests of Ankara and Baku and Armenia’s interests, or they sharply change the current policy. However, they’re not changing the policy since they’re incapable. The authorities haven’t understood that their world view is the reason why there are problems. They will continue to behave the way they do, and this will lead to new snap elections,” he stated.

“Mikaela Jav” made a name for herself as a DJ, spinning infectious electronic beats on the Spanish island of Ibiza, long famed for its fervent nightlife. The host of “Mikaela & Friends” parties, which kicked off on Saturday nights in the summer of 2015, also had an active presence on Facebook, where she posted sultry, jet-setting photos in Greece, Thailand, and Las Vegas.

In Spanish press interviews, DJ Mikaela gushed about her love for Ibiza, her musical inspiration, and her life in Russia, which she described as her home.An advertisement for one of “Mikaela Jav”’s parties in Ibiza.

In fact, OCCRP can reveal in this joint investigation with Transparency International’s U.K. chapter, “Mikaela Jav” is Izzat Khanim Javadova, a cousin of Azerbaijani president Ilham Aliyev. (Javadova’s stage name, Mikaela, is the name of her 22-year-old daughter).

Over the past few years, she and her husband, Suleyman Javadov, have been the targets of a UK investigation into millions of pounds that the country’s National Crime Agency (NCA) suspects are the proceeds of “corruption, theft or embezzlement.”Credit: Jalal-Aliyev.azA young Izzat Khanim Javadova.

The existence of this investigation was revealed last year by the Evening Standard, and the newspaper’s reporting led to the release of documents showing that an “Azerbaijani couple” had received £13.9 million (nearly US$19.6 million) from questionable origins.

OCCRP earlier discovered that the Ibiza-loving DJ and her husband were the couple in question, but were unable to reveal their names until today, when the Evening Standard won a legal appeal to lift the court’s anonymity order.

The Javadovs used a network of 20 opaque companies based in mostly offshore jurisdictions to receive the funds in their UK accounts, according to the NCA. As a result, the agency argued, the money flowed in a way that “would not necessarily involve an auditable trail of banking transactions.”

NCA investigators identified six of these companies as being part of the Azerbaijani Laundromat, an all-purpose financial vehicle revealed by OCCRP in 2017. The system allowed the country’s ruling elite to embezzle funds, avoid taxes, launder money, funnel bribes to European parliamentarians, and move illicit funds out of Azerbaijan to the West, where it was used to purchase properties and fund luxurious lifestyles.

Leaked bank records show that the six companies from which the Javadovs received the millions — as well as a seventh identified by OCCRP but missed by investigators — were also involved in other questionable Laundromat transactions.

While previous investigations showed that many high-level Azerbaijanis used the Laundromat, Javadova is the first member of the ruling Aliyev family known to have done so.

President Ilham Aliyev has ruled the oil-rich Caucasian country with an iron fist for nearly two decades, and his tenure has been marked by massive violations of press freedoms and human rights. The Aliyev family has also attained enormous wealth during his rule.

Unconvincing Explanations

While Izzat Khanim Javadova and Suleyman Javadov are not high-profile figures in Azerbaijan, her late father served as a member of parliament, and his father was a deputy energy minister until last year.

The reporters targeted work for Proekt, one of Russia’s last remaining independent investigative outlets. The searches came ahead of a publication detailing the alleged wealth of the country’s interior minister.

Russian police on Tuesday searched the apartments of three investigative journalists working for independent investigative outlet Proekt and their relatives.

Proekt is one of the last independent media outlets focusing on in-depth investigations. The homes raided belonged to Editor-in-Chief Roman Badanin and journalist Maria Zholobova. Authorities detained Deputy Editor Mikhail Rubin before taking him to his parents’ apartment where they executed a raid.

The raids came just before Proekt planned to publish an investigation into the alleged wealth of Interior Minister Vladimir Kolokoltsev and his son and other relatives. The story dropped soon after the raids began.

On Telegram, Proekt journalists wrote that despite the raids, “we will publish it anyway.”

Proekt later said the raids were tied to a defamation case brought over a 2017 film Badanin and Zholobova had worked on.

It was not immediately clear why Rubin had been detained and his parents’ apartment raided.

‘Foreign agent’ label places political, economic pressure on media

Political opposition and the media have experienced increasing pressure under Russian President Vladimir Putin. 

The Russian state has affixed the “foreign agent” label to several opposition media outlets. This forces outlets to disclose their sources of funding and label their publication as such.

The impact of the “foreign agent” label means that advertisers are deterred and the stigma can prevent sources from wanting to talk.

In April, the Riga-based outlet Meduza received the designation, forcing it to crowdfund to compensate for the resulting loss of ad revenue.

In May, another independent outlet VTimes was targeted. It did not survive and shutdown earlier this month.

The “foreign agent” law has also been used to lob steep fines at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, which has requested the European Court of Human Rights take up the matter.

Fearful authorities stage crackdown 

Ahead of September parliamentary elections, all unofficial opposition is in the crosshairs of state power.

The anti-corruption foundation of jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny was recently labeled “extremist.” The designation prevents members of his organization from running for office.

ar/rt (AFP, AP)

Danny Sjursen | Published: Jun 29,2021

THIS past September, Turkey and Israel encouraged Azerbaijan’s ‘mini-Stalin’ of a strongman to forcefully seize the disputed mountainous patch of Armenian-inhabited Caucasus-earth known as Nagorno-Karabakh. These treaty or decisively de-facto allies, respectively, armed and backed Baku’s decision to take what’s been called a ‘frozen conflict’ out of the freezer for good — thereby committing the ‘supreme crime’ of aggression, according to the post-war Nuremberg Principles. Some 6,000 soldiers and civilians were killed; tens of thousands were displaced. Washington stood aside, and mostly mute. Moscow brokered a truce in its own backyard, and — more selflessly than the west cares to admit — deployed peacekeepers that are more put upon than an American soldier (trust me) would ever care to be. In the end, the Russian-mediated ‘peace’ will probably prove more suspended-stasis than settled-stalemate, sowing the seeds of the next war — which may go big and turn regional — that’s likely to kick-off sooner than later.

During and just after the collapse of the Soviet Union, between 1988–1994, some 30,000 people were killed in this ethnic and territorial conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh — which has long been (despite Baku’s protestations) inhabited mostly by ethnic Armenians. After the last truce, both sides settled into World War I-style trench lines separated by a few hundred kilometres, and occasionally slogged it out for a few minutes or hours — but mostly the conflict slowly ‘froze,’ without any real progress towards a long-term diplomatic settlement.

These days, after a clear — if not exactly decisive — Azeri victory, the antagonists now sit sometimes less than 15 metres apart, weapons ever-trained on one another. Armenian and Azeri soldiers occasionally confer at the ‘contact line’ in No Man’s Land, and — as ubiquitous internet videos show — this rarely ends well. Scuffles ensue, as the hated foes hit each other with rifle butts, shoot in the air and curse — many sustaining injuries ranging from bruises and cuts (for now). It’s a touchy and tenuous situation, and there’s scant chance that a few thousand awkwardly — if admirably — situated Russian troops can do much more than delay the next implosion.

The real problem is the American-allied accelerants — Israel, and especially Turkey — who’ve not ceased catalysing the conflict, and aiding and abetting Azeri aggression along the way. Both parties — poor and under-equipped Armenia and resource rich, military-tech savvy Azerbaijan — are even now jockeying for micro-tactical advantage in the hills, bidding their time until the next nonsensical flare-up. This last blowup was more violent than most other contemporary regional conflicts. For example, the month and a half long Nagorno-Karabakh War was (per capita) about 60 times as bloody, per capita, as the war in Ukraine’s Donbas region — which garners far more media attention — with an average of 130 killed a day, versus about eight a day in the more than seven year old Ukraine conflict.

Furthermore, the half-life of major Nagorno-Karabakh combat cataclysms seems to be nose-diving. Fighting first started between the two sides in the wake of the 1917 Russian Revolution, until it was put-down by civil war-victorious Soviet troops. After that matters calmed until 1988 — some 70 years of status quo. After the 1994 ceasefire, the next major combat held off until 2016 — 22 years. The most recent outbreak, however, was barely four years later, and — if I were a betting man — the next madness will be in the offing within a year or two.

Unlike the American-allied Turks and Israelis, the international community ought be thanking — rather than reflexively demonising — Russia, which has shown enormous restraint, and is currently guiding the ‘cold peace’ between the two sides. As I predicted in an interview towards the tail-end of the recent fighting, ‘If this thing gets solved, or put back in the freezer… it will be Putin playing king Solomon and cutting the Nagorno-Karabakh baby in half.’

Consider this: Armenia is a member of ‘Russia’s NATO,’ the Collective Security Treaty Organisation — yet even when Azerbaijan targeted SCUD ballistic missile launchers and S-300 air defence systems inside Armenia itself, Moscow chose to ignore the incidents and eschew its arguable obligation to come to Yerevan’s defence. Instead, after sequential failed attempts by France and the United States, the other parties to the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe Minsk Group — that has long overseen the unsuccessful diplomatic efforts to settle the longstanding conflict — Russia threaded the needle and negotiated the current truce.

The Russian troops on the ground are in a tough spot — only don’t expect any empathy from American service-members who’d whine endlessly in the same situation. Beyond serving as an — always off-putting — ‘tripwire’ between the hair-trigger-ready foes, Moscow’s mediators are stuck in an almost impossible intervention, often managing the most mundane of matters. The Russian peacekeeping portfolio extends to everything from mediating disputes over water access or stray cows — Moscow even established a hotline locals can call for help with lost cattle! — plus removing shards of missiles stuck in orchards.

Nevertheless, Russia gets no credit, and realises it’ll be in for only blame if something goes bad on the border. ‘You will see, the moment something goes wrong in Karabakh, Russia will be blamed for that and more. As the usual suspect, Russia is always a fall guy,’ said one Russian government-linked analyst — and he’s not wrong. This, despite the exceedingly obvious fact that Moscow brushed aside Armenian requests for its treaty-obligated intervention, negotiated the truce, bears the awkward peacekeeping burden — and ultimately has nothing to gain, and plenty to lose, in the doing. In Nagorno-Karabakh, at least, it’s ‘all risk, no reward’ for the Russkies.

The war ended with Azeri troops recapturing significant swaths of Nagorno-Karabakh, which has — not altogether inaccurately — been buzzword-dubbed the ‘first postmodern conflict,’ and a ‘technological victory.’ Baku has Israel and Turkey to thank for that, along with ample natural gas revenues, that allowed Azerbaijan to purchase Tel Aviv’s HAROP loitering ‘suicide drone’ UAV system — designed to destroy targets by diving and exploding on them — and a batch of Bayraktar TB2 missile-armed UAVs from Turkey. These unmanned aerial killers amply-attritted Armenia’s lumbering Soviet-era armoured forces so sufficiently that — unlike in the 1988–1994 war —the two sides’ tanks apparently never even got within shooting distance of one another.

All told, Armenia lost half of its total tank fleet and two-thirds of its mobile air defence batteries. The gig was up for the Armenians once Azeri special forces seized the strategic city of Shusha, overlooking the Nagorno-Karabakh region’s capital city of Stepanakert — which was, at that point, inside enemy mortar range — and Yerevan had no choice but to accept a humiliating ceasefire, the beefier mountainous enclave was cutoff.

Would that that were the end of it. Unfortunately, Baku — backed and bolstered by Turkey’s madcap neo-sultan Erdogan — isn’t satisfied with its newly-won gains, and Azeri authoritarian-in-chief, Ilham Aliyev, has only escalated his irredentist-absolutist ethno-chauvinist rhetoric. At a troubling, yet instructive, December 10 victory parade in Baku, Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan joined president Aliyev on the reviewing stand as some 3,000 Azeri soldiers triumphantly marched past. In his post-parade remarks, Aliyev then delivered a not-so-veiled threat to reopen the war and conquer swaths of Armenia proper — three regions of which, including the capital of Yerevan, he called ‘historically Azeri lands.’ Naturally, that’s nonsense — on historical merits — but worse still, such bellicose bluster is near-certain to cause an all-but-obligatory reaction.

Aliyev’s rants — and proclaimed goals — essentially erase Armenia as a viable and legitimate state. That’s just bound to existentially frighten, and elicit an equal and opposite hyper-nationalist response from Armenian descendants of genocide victims — which the Turkish perpetrators still officially deny — of an ethnic-cleansing suffered barely a century ago. Besides, unless Yerevan stands ready (it doesn’t!) to surrender over all of its Armenian-majority brethren in Nagorno-Karabakh — along with its national pride — it has little choice but to fight further, even if the endeavour is hopeless against a more populous, wealthy, and well-armed adversary.

After all, de-facto autonomous Nagorno-Karabakh’s economy has shrunk to one quarter of its former size since the latest war: what with almost half of its farmland — agriculture being the region’s second largest employment sector after the military — now under Baku’s control. An entity so circumscribed is no longer viable. The status quo can’t and won’t suffice from Armenia’s perspective. For Yerevan, it may be fight-or-flight time in the crazed Caucasus.

So mark my words: when that Armenian counter-attack comes, or Azeri revanchist re-engagement kicks off, Washington will be caught flat-footed, busy blaming Moscow for anything and everything under its peripheral sun. Meanwhile, its conflict-catalysing Israeli little brother and Turkish NATO-frenemies will raise the regional stakes, and risk a real regional war, with Russia — the one real adult in the riskiest room in town.

ScheerPost.com, June 27. Danny Sjursen is a retired US army officer, senior fellow at the Centre for International Policy, contributing editor at Antiwar.com and director of the Eisenhower Media Network.

I heard about widespread fraud during the snap parliamentary elections, but I don’t have any concrete facts. This is what outgoing Member of Parliament of Armenia Naira Zohrabyan told reporters today.

Zohrabyan also admitted that she is impatiently waiting for the ‘Armenia’ and ‘I Have Honor’ blocs to apply to the Constitutional Court to know the scales of violations and fraud once and for all. She added that perhaps the opposition shouldn’t have offended Nikol Pashinyan’s supporters since that made the people afraid and made them unite more around Nikol.

“We must not blame the people for not being educated. We need to enlighten them. Most members of our society don’t understand security issues, but they are not to blame since they were taught this way,” the parliamentarian said, apologized to the members of society whom she had offended and added that she still doesn’t understand those people’s stance and motives.