When Kazakhstan opened its biennial defense expo, KADEX, in May it announced that it would sign over a billion dollars in deals during the event. "We will prepare and sign more than 32 agreements and memorandums totaling $1.2 billion on purchase of military equipment and international cooperation," said a senior defense official, Major General Talgat Zhanzhumenov, before the show. "We are looking at creating joint ventures of our enterprises with partners from Russia, [with] European partners, [and] we're looking at several projects with Turkish defense enterprises."
That $1.2 billion was a pretty remarkable figure, more than Kazakhstan's current defense procurement budget for a year. But Kazakhstan government officials would not give specifics about those deals, in spite of the apparently precise numbers they had available. First they told reporters that the package would be announced at the end of the show, then at a press conference two weeks after the show.
That didn't happen, but there were still some indications: a press release from Kazakhstan Engineering, the state defense manufacturer, mentioned deals related to American drones, French air defense radars, and Chinese naval vessels. But they wouldn't give details. (And officials from General Atomics, the drone manufacturer, declined to comment; apparently they weren't ready to make an announcement.)
Now, Kazakhstan has upped the stakes: The Minister of Defense now says that "[a]s a result of the exhibition, a total of $2.6 billion worth of contracts, memorandums and agreements were signed," TengriNews reported. But still, Kazakhstan officials declined to comment to The Bug Pit about what those deals actually entail. So either Kazakhstan's armsmakers are working hard behind the scenes, or its creative accountants and PR people are.
Joshua Kucera, a senior correspondent, is Eurasianet's former Turkey/Caucasus editor and has written for the site since 2007.
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