Voice of America: Assad receives military aid from Belarus

Voice of America has raised a theme of Belarusian missiles supplies to Syria.

Western experts and analysts are concerned about military cooperation growth between Minsk and Damask.

U.S. officials are increasingly concerned that Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad is receiving new military assistance from Belarus, a tiny nation which appears willing to flout the international effort to isolate the dictator and force him from power.

Western officials and outside analysts say that Belarus is providing Damascus with technology that would improve the capabilities of Assad's surface-to-surface missiles, one of the Syrian military's primary weapons during its brutal ongoing crackdown on rebels throughout the country, National Journals's Yochi J. Dreazen writes in the article “Is Belarus Assad's Newest Ally?”

According to the information received by Dreazen from closed sources, the technology would increase the accuracy of the missiles, making it easier for Assad's forces to target and destroy even well-entrenched and well-hidden rebel positions.

The author told Voice of America's correspondent he became interested in Belarus some years ago, when information about military supplies from Eastern Europe to world's trouble spots just appeared in press.

Dreazen says  a couple of years ago he asked people from intelligence and military structures who supplied arms from the region. He heard about Belarus and began to give more attention to the country.

Military analyst Scott Johnson, who researches militaries around the world, said to Dreazen that Belarus's state-owned weapons-development company is suspected of working with its Syrian counterpart to build new fiber-optic gyroscopes.

"It would increase the regime’s ability to deliver destruction with even more deadly precision than with what is currently guiding their missiles," the author quotes Johnson in the article.

Answering Voice of America's question what facts allowed American politicians and experts to come to a conclusion that the Belarusian authorities sell gyroscopes to Syria, Dreazen noted specialists draw such conclusions monitoring cargo supplies from Belarus and technological improvements of certain Syrian devices. Having information that Belarusian and Syrian companies cooperate in a certain area and monitoring the development of Syrian products in related sectors, one can easily state there is a high tech exchange between the parties.

We remind it is not the first time when Alyaksandr Lukashenka regime has been accused of arms supplies to the world's trouble spots. International organizations and military experts called the Near East, Africa and Latin America among importers of Belarusian weapons.