Sergey Goreslavskiy, Deputy Director General, Rosoboronexport

‘I think we can congratulate our Bahraini partners on the occasion of Bahrain International Defence Exhibition and Conference (BIDEC) which has established right framework for the long run work. Especially since we can see the attention paid by the leaders of Kingdom of Bahrain and the king himself to the preparation of the exhibition.

Although we have no very large-scale Bahrain-dedicated supplies the size of country should be taken into account. Russia has delivered to Bahrain AK assault rifles, antitank missile systems ‘Kornet-E’ and army vehicles KAMAZ. The fact the relations are being developed and evolved is important, so we hope this trend will keep going in future.

Today our Bahraini partners take an active interest in a wide range of Russian products such as air defense systems of various range, armored and automotive vehicles, antitank weapons and fire arms etc. Middle Eastern countries are no strangers to international terrorism threat. Special attention is paid to all-level security matters in this regard. That is why we have shown in Bahrain new Rosoboronexport-designed product ‘Russian-made Security Systems’ among others. It includes every aid to administer the law, fight terrorism, defend critical assets and new cyber security decisions.

Interest in Russian military products is growing really larger all around the world. We see promising outlook for growing supplies of Russian defense-oriented products in The Gulf region in particular. Besides, the target customers for our weapon systems, equipment, technologies etc. include defense ministries, different law enforcement bodies and special forces.

I would like to emphasize that we consider all the exhibitions as very important also in the context of commencing new cooperation projects, starting negotiations on various supplies as well as new sites to specify positions with those partners we have joint practical projects.’