Where did Transdniestria’s missing missiles go?

By Edward Lucas

Date: 07/07/05

MANPADS, as shoulder-fired heat-seeking missiles are termed by security geeks, are interesting for two reasons. One is that the name is probably the worst acronym ever invented. It stands for "Man-Portable Air Defense System" which confuses name and initials ("man" and "P-A-D"). Worse, even in the singular it ends in S, so the real plural should be MANPADSes.

But linguistic fastidiousness aside, the real reason for worrying about them is that they are a terrorist's favourite weapon: a single missile is just 1.5m long and weighs only 20 kilos (think of a bag with skis) and capable of hitting the modern world at probably its most vulnerable points - the take-off and landing of passenger jets. Fired from a kilometre away, it can hit a plane in two seconds.

For some time I've been hearing rumours that a bunch of MANPADSes had gone missing from a Soviet-era weapons dump in Transdniestria, a breakaway region of Moldova which is a kind of Disneyland for people who miss the Cold War and like James Bond films. In The Economist, this week, I finally stood the story up.

Transdniestria is a tinpot dictatorship run by one of the rudest men I have ever met, Igor Smirnov. When I interviewed him, his first question was "where the hell did you get that haircut?". Smirnov is the front man for a sinister gang with deep links to Russian 'biznes' and the old KGB. His minder, the head of Transdniestria's omnipresent security services, is a charming, chilling figure called Vladimir Antyufeyev, wanted by the Latvian authorities for his role in trying to crush the independence movement there in 1990-91 (He told me that he was defending his country, the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic, from "bourgeois nationalists").

Transdniestria is not just a home for money-launderers, gun-runners, and all kinds of smugglers. It is also the site of one of Europe's biggest arms dumps, at a place called Kolbasno. These are left over from the Cold War, when they would have been used to re-supply Warsaw Pact forces trying to prevent a NATO push into the Balkans, or somesuch nonsense.

The Russians claim that they can't withdraw the tens of thousands of tons of weapons and munitions still stored there, because the Transdniestrian authorities won't let them. But they did agree, under Western pressure, to remove the remaining stocks of shoulder-launched Igla missiles. The plane carrying these flew out of the Russian military bit of Tiraspol (Transdniestria's capital) airport in December 2003. Because Moldova controls the airspace above Transdniestria, the plane had to stop in the Moldovan capital, Chisinau. There officials made an interesting discovery: the instruction from Moscow was to remove 490 missiles. But the plane was carrying only 420.

So where were the rest? The eventual explanation from the Russian/Transdniestrian authorities was lame even by their standards. The missiles concerned had been damaged by a water leak (faulty plumbing was, in my view, a key factor in the collapse of Communism). And they had been destroyed. These things can happen, of course. But when valuable and dangerous weapons are destroyed, it is usual to keep some evidence of their fate. Nothing of the kind was forthcoming.

Just one of these missiles would be enough to close a big European airport for weeks - whether it brought down an airliner or just blew off an engine. So it would be reassuring to think that Europe's finest minds and firmest intentions are focusing hard on Transdniestria and how to decriminalise, democratise and demilitarise it. But I'm not holding my breath.

Edward Lucas is Central and Eastern Europe correspondent of The Economist.

Feature on the unsecured stocks of Soviet weapons in Moldova's breakaway region Transdniestria and the possibility of their proliferation.