The Putin and Maduro regimes had reached an agreement last October, but the general director of the arms consortium announced that there will be a delay due to “problems of logistics order”
FILE PHOTO: Rifles at the Kalashnikov Group stand during the military-technical forum international “Army-2021” at the Patriot Exhibition and Congress Center in Moscow region, Russia on August 23, 2021. REUTERS/Maxim Shemetov
The general director of the Russian Kalashnikov arms consortium, Vladimir Lepin, declared this Friday that the factory to produce AK-103 rifles and ammunition in Venezuela will not be launched this year due to logistical problems.
“No, it won’t start,” Lepin replied to a question from the Interfax agency about whether this year the Venezuelan factory will start manufacturing Kalashnikov rifles.
In October last year The envoy of the Venezuelan Presidency Adán Chávez announced that the construction of the Kalashnikov rifle factory would be completed in the second half of 2022.
Lepin indicated that the delay in commissioning start-up of the factory is due to problems of logistics order.
FILE PHOTO: Russian President Vladimir Putin meets with his Venezuelan counterpart , Nicolás Maduro, at the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia, on September 25, 2019. Sputnik/Alexei Druzhinin/Kremlin via REUTERS
The Russian-Venezuelan agreement for the construction of the plant was signed in 2006 , but his execution has been hampered both by corruption scandals and by US sanctions on Venezuela.
The former Russian senator Sergei Popelniúkhov, whose company was in charge of carrying out the project, in 2017 he was sentenced to 7 years in prison for the theft of more than 1,000 million rubles, about 16 million dollars at the exchange rate of that time.
The Caracas regime’s arms cooperation is not only with the Russian government. Missiles, bombs, radars and air defense systems, was the content of a cargo Boeing 747-200 F that landed in Venezuela on June 21 from Iran.
The military shipment arrived at the largest military base in Venezuela, El Libertador (in Bael), located in Palo Negro-Maracay, according to the Colombian magazine Semana, which accessed a report with a list of what the Iranian regime sent to its allies in Venezuela.
(With information from EFE)