ANKARA - In a move certain to evoke political tensions within the NATO Alliance, Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced on July 25 that negotiations between his country and Russia regarding the procurement of the S-400 air-defense missile system had concluded and that a deal was in place.
Turkey has sought a long-range air and missile defense system for years through its T-LORAMIDS program, which was officially launched in 2007. But that program foundered when Ankara announced its selection of a Chinese-derived alternative to the Russian S-300 system, the FD-2000 export version of the HQ-9, in 2013. Turkey's choice of the Chinese system over two offers from NATO-standard platforms - the Franco-Italian Eurosam Aster-30 and Raytheon theater ballistic missile defense variant of the Patriot, the Guidance Enhanced Missile-TBM, or GEM-T - immediately elicited pushback from U.S. and European NATO allies of Turkey, who feared integrating Chinese hardware and software into NATO's own Alliance-aligned air defense network.
Now it seems Turkey will move ahead with the Russian S-400 Triumf, a road-mobile, long-range surface-to-air missile system with a range of up to 250 miles. This would mark the first such instance of a NATO member purchasing the Russian-made system, though neighboring Greece has up to 12 batteries of the earlier-generation S-300PMU Favorit it acquired in a 2007 swap with Cyprus. These systems are in severe need of an upgrade in order to be functional and Greece has remained in prolonged negotiations with Russia since 2015 regarding acquiring new missiles and maintenance services for them.
While Turkey may be acquiring the S-400 as a near-term solution to its long-range air and missile defense needs, it is also running a parallel initiative with Eurosom to research, develop and coproduce a Turkish variant of the Aster-30 SAMP/T (sol-air moyenne portée terrestre or surface-to-air medium range/land) with full-scale development set to get underway in 2019. The signing of that agreement was announced by Turkey's defense minister Fikri Isikat at a Bastille Day reception at the French embassy in Ankara on July 14.
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