thefrontierpost.com By Andrew A. Latham and Kai Perket – The Frontier Post
On August 24th of this year, Saudi Prince Khalid bin Salman and Russian Co-lonel General Alexander Fomin signed a “military cooperation agreement” at the International Military-Technical Forum (ARMY 2021), a military arms expo, hosted in Moscow. While the contents of the deal itself remain undisclosed, it is likely to involve the sale of advanced Russian weap-ons systems that have proven their worth in Syria. It may also involve as well as other forms of technical cooperation and perhaps the deepening of institutional and diplomatic ties as well.
This isn’t the first such agreement between the two countries, of course. In 2017, Russia signed a deal to sell $3 billion worth of arms to Saudi Arabia, including the rights for local manufacture of Kornet-EM anti-tank missiles, TOS-1A multi rocket launchers, AGS-30 automatic grenade launchers and Kalashnikov rifles and ammunitions. For the most part, however, those deals never matured into actual transfers of weapons or technologies.
