Officials in Moscow have told the Russian news agency Interfax that the UN disarmament commission has taken up Russia's offer to join the UN operation monitoring Iraqi military facilities, and Russia would be joining the reconnaissance flights "as early as February-March 1998".

The "well-informed military diplomatic sources in Moscow" said the heads of the UN Special Commission responded positively to the offer by Defence Minister Igor Sergeyev, who spoke in favour of using Russian aircraft to monitor Iraq's military facilities when he visited France last week, the agency said.

It went on to quote a Russian Defence Ministry spokesman as saying Russia had An-30 observer aircraft which were "perfectly capable of taking part in the inspection flights over Iraq", and had already proved themselves in flights over the USA and Western Europe carried out under the Open Skies agreement.

If necessary, extra equipment might be installed on the Russian observer aircraft, the unidentified military sources told Interfax. ITAR-TASS news agency, in a later report, quoted a Russian foreign ministry spokesman as saying a final decision by the UN disarmament committee was still needed before Russian planes could be deployed.

"The UN Special Commission needs to take a final decision," Valeriy Nesterushkin, deputy head of the Foreign Ministry's Press department, said, according to ITAR-TASS.

BBC Monitoring (http://www.monitor.bbc.co.uk), based in Caversham in southern England, selects and translates information from radio, television, press, news agencies and the Internet from 150 countries in more than 70 languages.
 

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