Kyrgyzstan buys combat drones after clashes with Tajikistan
Kyrgyzstan has purchased a new batch of Turkish-made military drones, bolstering an air fleet that already includes Bayraktar TB2 unmanned aerial vehicles.
In a Facebook post on January 17, Daiyrbek Orunbekov, press secretary for the presidential administration, linked the purchase of the drones to the recent history of conflicts on the border with Tajikistan.
Orunbekov identified the new purchases as Aksungur and Anka UAVs, but did not provide details on either the number of units purchased or the amount paid, however, he suggested that the government was able to afford the drones thanks to the savings it made by cutting employee salaries public.
“It is clear that if the country is unable to defend itself, then the quarterly bonuses and additional payments to civil servants have no meaning. That is why it is completely inappropriate for colleagues to feel despondent about alleged 'bonus cuts',” Orunbekov wrote on Facebook.
When he alluded to Kyrgyzstan's need to defend itself, Orunbekov was unequivocally referring to last year's border clashes with Tajikistan.
“After the clashes in Batken, special attention is being paid to strengthening the armed forces,” he wrote, alluding to the Kyrgyz province most affected in that conflict.
Kyrgyzstan purchased an untold number of Bayraktar TB2 drones in late 2021, then topped it off with the latest Bayraktars the following October. In September, President Sadyr Japarov presided over the inauguration ceremony of the country's first unmanned aerial vehicle base, managed by the Border Service, a branch of the State Committee for National Security.
"I would like to emphasize that efforts to strengthen our armed forces are focused only on defense," Japarov said on that occasion.
Japarov has said on other occasions that the Kyrgyz government is spending "unprecedented sums" to strengthen its defense capabilities, although he did not offer specific figures. Kyrgyzstan's rush to bolster its military arsenal after the latest waves of unrest on Tajikistan's border has not focused solely on air power. In October, Defense Minister Baktybek Bekbolotov announced that Kyrgyzstan had purchased a Belarusian-made Pechora-2BM anti-aircraft missile system.
“The system will arrive in the near future and be deployed in Batken,” the minister said.
This clamor for the construction of a powerful arsenal of weapons comes against the backdrop of a lingering chill in relations between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan after hostilities in September that claimed more than 100 lives, mostly civilians. Both sides accuse each other of sparking the clashes. However, most of the available evidence indicates that the majority of infrastructure damage inflicted in the conflict was suffered by Kyrgyz civilians.
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The article Kyrgyzstan buys combat drones after clashes with Tajikistan comes from Scenari Economics .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/il-kirgizistan-compra-droni-da-combattimento-dopo-gli-scontri-con-il-tagikistan/ on Thu, 19 Jan 2023 11:30:53 +0000.