Tehran gets a "discreet" top-new-radar from Moscow ...

"... a report by the U.S. global security consultancy Stratfor claimed Saturday that Tehran recently apparently got a big and very discreet helping hand from Russia. No time frame for the assist was given... If Russia has provided Tehran with a new radar system, which Stratfor says reportedly went through third-party intermediaries Venezuela and Belarus, it is likely to have been one that would enhance Iran's air-defense network rather than merely add to it. Stratfor didn't identify the Russian system that its sources said Belarus, sold to a Venezuelan firm, "which then transferred it to Iran in a recent transaction in Abu Dhabi," capital of the United Arab Emirates.... Russia is striving to boost its arms exports, a key foreign currency earner. To mask sales it doesn't want exposed to international scrutiny it has frequently used Belarus, which has its own arms industry dating to the Soviet era, as a front. Moscow used Belarus, and sometimes Ukraine and Bulgaria, to disguise arms sales to the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein throughout the 1990s when Iraq was under tight economic sanctions imposed by the United Nations after the August 1990 invasion of Kuwait.... Stratfor suggests: "Moscow had no intention of sacrificing its Iran lever completely. The report on this latest military transaction has raised the possibility that Russia sees little utility in exercising that lever once again."...... On Nov. 14, Brig. Gen. Ahmad Miqani, a senior air force officer, said Iran's defense industry was developing a new radar system that would extend its ability to detect hostile aircraft and missiles from around 250 miles to more than 1,850 miles. That's a stunning technological feat if it's true. But the implication of the Stratfor report, which remains unverified, is that Iran is actually talking about a Russian system it has surreptitiously acquired...."