In Kazakhstan Defence Ministers of CIS member states will talk of cooperation

A meeting of the Ministers of Defence of nine states of the Commonwealth of Independent States (Azerbaijan, Armenia, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan) will be held at the Kazakhstani town of Shchuchinsk. Moldova, Turkmenistan and Ukraine will participate in the Council's meeting as observers.

The agenda of the meeting of the Council of Ministers of Defence (CMD) of the CIS member states includes more than 30 items.

The heads of the military agencies will give priority to the questions of military cooperation, with the plan of joint activities of operational training of the CIS states' armed forces, the state of safety of flights in the armed forces of the CIS countries, and the question of measures to control the sale of the portable ground-to-air missile systems (PERKs) of the Igla and Strela types in the Commonwealth member states being viewed by them as the most important ones.

The question of setting up an effective mechanism of control over the movement of PERKs was submitted for consideration by the Council of Ministers of Defence by Russia, and the chairman of the CMD of the CIS, the Defence Minister of Russia Sergei Ivanov, will make a report on this theme.

As the head of the Russian defence agency told journalists on the day before after the talks with his Kazakhstani counterpart Mukhtar Altynbayev, the problem of control of portable PERKs is pressing. As Ivanov said, cases of the use of these weapons by terrorists against civil aircraft in different regions of the world have already been registered.

The Russian Minister said that ways and practical measures to form a system of control over sale of this dangerous kind of weapons by the CIS states and the procedure for organising prompt mutual information of the CIS countries by one another will be discussed in detail at the meeting.