RUSSIA ENDS LEASE OF GABALA RADAR STATION IN AZERBAIJAN
In mid-December, Moscow announced its decision to abandon the radar station in Gabala, Azerbaijan, prompting discussions about a deterioration of Russo-Azerbaijani relations. Both sides have nevertheless officially declared that bilateral relations will not be affected by the decision. The official reason for Russia’s evacuation of the station is a sharp increase of the leasing rent demanded by Azerbaijan. However, previous changes in Azerbaijani, as well as Russian, military doctrines have made a continuous Russian presence at Gabala untenable. The future of the radar station is now uncertain as Azerbaijan looks for new partnerships in operating the station. Israel is seemingly considered an interested party.
BACKGROUND: The Gabala station, a Daryal-type bistatic phase-array radar, is situated in the southern foothills of the Greater Caucasus mountain range in northern Azerbaijan, slightly over 160 miles northwest of Baku. Since becoming operational in 1985, it has constituted one among a handful of major radar stations that were pillars of the Soviet and later Russian early warning system. Gabala has been monitoring the aerial space over a vast territory of up to 6.000 kilometers, covering Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, North and Central Africa, as well as all Middle Eastern and the majority of South and Southeast Asian countries.
In case of a hypothetical ballistic missile attack launched against the Soviet Union or Russia from the southwest or south of its borders, the Gabala station was supposed to detect such an attack and alert the military headquarters in Moscow. According to official Russian sources, the Gabala radar station effectively identified the launch of around 150 scud missiles during the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-1988.
Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the Gabala radar station became the property of the independent republic of Azerbaijan which soon leased it to Russia. According to the most recent agreement in 2002, Moscow had to pay US$ 7 million annually for the lease of the radar station, aside from a total of US$ 15 million paid for electricity and other operation-related purposes. In the radar station, 1,000-1,100 Russian military specialists were permanently deployed, assisted by 300-400 Azerbaijani personnel.
The term of the agreement ended in late December 2012, and the fate of the radar station had since 2011 been the subject of heated debates between Russian and Azerbaijani officials, particularly after Baku announced it would raise the lease tariff dramatically from the initial US$ 7 million to US$ 300 million annually. Importantly, whereas Azerbaijani authorities insisted that an agreement should span over three to five years, the Russians preferred a term lasting until 2025 as a condition for modernizing the station with guarantees of a long-term continuous lease.
IMPLICATIONS: As news spread about Moscow’s abandonment of the Gabala station, Russian and Azerbaijani authorities rushed to underline that the incident would have a negligible impact. While the Russians stressed that the radar station was outdated and that abandoning it will not endanger Russia’s security, Azerbaijani officials asserted that the end of the lease would in no way affect Azerbaijan’s relations with Russia.
Moscow has since 2005-6 invested heavily in constructing a series of early warning stations along its southern, western and partially also northern borders. This constitutes an attempt to ensure self-reliance and modernize its early warning system in the context of ongoing disputes with Ukraine regarding the lease of the two Daryal-type Soviet-era radar stations in Mukachevo and Sevastopol, and to counter the heatedly discussed establishment of a U.S. missile shield in Central and Eastern Europe. The Gabala station has previously played a role in such efforts: in 2007, President Putin offered Washington to jointly exploit the station and sharing the collected data, which would be done with Baku's consent. The U.S., however, declined the offer.
One of the six Voronezh-DM-type stations, which are more economic, advanced, and easier to service than the Daryal-type radars, is situated in the town of Armavir in the Krasnodar region of the North Caucasus. According to Russian sources, the cost of constructing the Armavir radar station was less than one third of the annual lease demanded by Baku. Importantly, Russian authorities assert that with a range of around 4,200 kilometers, the Armavir station is a safe substitution for Gabala.
Azerbaijani authorities have stressed that Moscow’s abandonment of the Gabala station will have no negative impact on the current state of Russo-Azerbaijani relations, which have stabilized in recent years. Indeed, with the exception of Russia’s backing of Armenia, Moscow and Baku have had few disputes given their cooperation on issues related to the Caspian Sea and Azerbaijan’s generally balanced policies toward the West and Russia. Instead, Baku has often pointed to the serious environmental issues surrounding the exploitation of the radar station, which is in stark contrast to the recent efforts by Azerbaijani authorities to turn the area into a tourist resort.
However, it should be recalled that Azerbaijan adopted a new military doctrine in 2010, according to which no military base of a foreign country could be hosted on Azerbaijani soil. Though the Gabala radar station would not necessarily be considered a military base in strictly legal terms, this move created certain pressure on the negotiation process and limited Baku’s room for maneuver. Additionally, Baku's initial plans envisaged doubling the lease tariff to US$ 15 million. Yet after Moscow announced in 2011 that the radar station would be significantly modernized and replaced with a portable station that would be Russian property and utilized along with the facilities of the Gabala station, Azerbaijan raised the rent to US$ 300 million, effectively ruling out any further lease of the station by Moscow.
As Anar Valiyev has pointed out, as long as the Gabala station remained Azerbaijani property, Moscow had no legal right to share data collected at the station with any third party, for instance Armenia with which Azerbaijan formally remains in a state of war. The prospect of Armenia’s key ally possessing a military installation on Azerbaijani soil caused discontent in the country, along with the fact that Turkey and Pakistan, Baku’s closest partners, would be subjected to monitoring by the Russian-owned Gabala station.
CONCLUSIONS: For Russia, keeping control over Gabala was very much a matter of prestige and of maintaining some sort of military presence on Azerbaijani soil, one of their last bastions in the Caucasus following the evacuation of Russia’s military bases in Georgia. Furthermore, according to military analysts the new radar station in Armavir cannot completely substitute for the loss of Gabala. Gabala is located 750 kilometers southeast of Armavir, and has a range of up to 6,000 kilometers in comparison to Armavir’s 4,200 kilometers. In addition, the Armavir station is situated just north of the Greater Caucasus mountain range, which impedes its monitoring of the aerial space south of the mountains.
A source in the Azerbaijani Ministry of Foreign Affairs has repeatedly asserted that in off-the-record talks, the Israelis have expressed interest in some form of co-exploitation of the Gabala station. However, the Russians have disassembled and removed the costly and technologically advanced equipment used at the station, without which the radar is not operational. Additionally, the U.S. ambassador to Azerbaijan has recently stated that Washington has no interest in the radar station. It is highly unlikely that a Western – or Israeli – presence would ever be formally installed at the Gabala station, yet some form of cooperation cannot be ruled out completely given the improved state of Azerbaijan’s relations to Israel and its deteriorating relationship with Iran. In addition, Azerbaijan is reluctant to lose an important installation on its soil which it cannot currently exploit due to a lack of trained staff and technology (see the 02/08/2012 issue of the CACI Analyst).
However, data collected from the Gabala radar station could hypothetically be used by Israel for monitoring Iranian aerial space, along with the existing U.S.-run X-ban radar at Mount Keren in the Negev desert and a similar U.S. radar station in Kurecik, in eastern Turkey. In both cases, and especially regarding the Kurecik radar, the U.S. ultimately makes decisions regarding the radars and whether to share retrieved information with the Israelis. This makes Gabala particularly attractive in Israel’s perspective. Despite current denials from all sides, the issue of the use of the Gabala station could turn into a matter of further bargaining in the years to come, potentially involving external powers and possibly becoming a new source of tension in the region.
AUTHOR’S BIO: Dr. Emil Souleimanov is assistant professor at the Department of Russian and East European Studies, Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic. He is the author of Understanding Ethnopolitical Conflict: The Karabakh, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia Wars Reconsidered (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming in 2013) and An Endless War: The Russian-Chechen Conflict in Perspective (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2007).
