Close to North Korea, Russia Upgrades Air Defenses

By Dave Majumdar

With the potent new S-400 [4] in the Russian Far East. Though long scheduled, the new S-400 batteries are set to become operational in December 22 in the Primorsky territory just as tensions are rising in the region on the Korean peninsula.

The Russian Inferfax news [5] agency quoted the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) saying the “launch of new divisional sets of the S-400 Triumph air defense missile system (Vladivostok, Primorsky Krai, Zelenogorsk, Leningrad Region) will guard the eastern and western airbanks of the Russian Federation.”

As Vasily Kashin, a senior fellow at the Center for Comprehensive European and International Studies at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics told The National Interest, the deployment of the S-400 was long-scheduled even if the timing appears convenient. “From the MoD statement, it looks like it is a scheduled rearmament of the existing S-300 units with the new systems,” Kashin said. “It is not an additional force relocation there.”

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Kashin conceded that there might be a tangential connection between the developing standoff in Korea and the S-400 deployment, however it is clear that the Russians are not deploying additional forces to the region. “Maybe it has something but it is not some kind of surge of forces,” Kashin said.