Russia seeks copter sales to Turkey and Venezuela

WASHINGTON, Jan. 5 (UPI) -- Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez closed out the old year in typical style -- by buying more high-tech Mil Mi-28N Night Hunter high-tech attack helicopters from Russia. And Turkey, a NATO member state for more than 50 years, is considering buying them too.

The RIA Novosti news agency reported Dec. 28 that Venezuela and Turkey together had ordered 12 more Mi-28N Night Hunter attack helicopters (NATO designation Havoc).

The venerable but still cutting-edge Mi-28 has been operated by the Russian air force for more than 20 years since 1988. And it incorporates a lot of the lessons in carrying heavy armor and survivability that the Russian armed forces' helicopter forces learned the hard way in their costly operations against mujahedin armed with U.S.-built Stinger handheld surface-to-air missiles during the 1979-87 Afghan War.

"We have 12 export orders for Mi-28N helicopters, including from Venezuela, and are ready to fulfill any contracts," Russian Helicopters chief Andrei Shibitov told RIA Novosti.

Shibitov also revealed that the Islamist Turkish government also was exploring the possibility of purchasing some of the helicopters, although no deal had been signed yet.

Venezuela already has bought Mi-28 Night Hunters on very easy credit terms from Russia as part of its massive arms buildup, by far the greatest of any country in Latin America. Venezuela does not currently face any serious internal insurgency challenges, but a large force of Mi-28s would enable it to far more effectively project its power against its neighbors, most notably the pro-American government of neighboring Colombia.

Because the Mi-28 Night Hunter was designed to work effectively in combat situations such as the Soviet armed forces experienced in Afghanistan, it also would be suitable for comparable Turkish counterinsurgency operations. Turkey fought a decade-long campaign against the PKK Kurdish guerrillas in the southeastern region of the country that cost 70,000 lives. Today, Turkish leaders look with distrust and concern on developments in the U.S. supported, oil-rich Kurdish region of northern Iraq.

As previously reported in these columns, the national Turkish newspaper Vatan, which has excellent military sources, claimed last month that its government intended to purchase 32 used Mi-28 Night Hunters from Russia in a billion-dollar agreement after efforts to purchase Cobra and Super Cobra helicopter gunships from the United States, Turkey's traditional supplier of the past half-century, had broken down.

Any purchase of Russian helicopters by Turkey would be a dramatic reversal of diplomatic, grand strategic and military procurement patterns going back centuries.

The Ottoman Turkish and czarist Russian empires were bitter enemies for many centuries, and through the 20th century that enmity was carried by mutual distrust between the Soviet Union and the secular, westward-looking Republic of Turkey founded by Kemal Ataturk. After the disintegration of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991, Turkey sought to increase its influence in the Turkic Muslim former Soviet republics of Azerbaijan and in Central Asia.

As RIA Novosti noted, purchasing Mi-28s would still be a stopgap measure for Turkey until a fleet of 52 new Agusta A-129 Mangusta helicopters, co-manufactured with Italy's AgustaWestland, have been delivered to the Turkish armed forces.

The Mi-28 is built by the Rostvertol plant in southern Russia.

The head of the Russian air force, three-star Col. Gen. Alexander Zelin, told reporters in Moscow last month that a new, state-of-the-art "fifth-generation" Russian helicopter was already being developed, RIA Novosti said.

"We are working on the design of a fifth-generation helicopter. Russia's military-industrial complex has solved the task of bringing into service the Mi-28N and (Kamov) Ka-52 ("Alligator") helicopters. Now we're working on a fifth-generation helicopter," Zelin said.