Turkey’s purchase of S-400 anti-aircraft missile systems from Russia became, as it is called in psychiatry, a phantom pain of Washington, when in a fever delirium the patient feels that his amputated leg is in place and it is on fire. The Americans seem to have an amputated organ - not a leg at all, but a head. Only this unfortunate fact can explain the initiative of US Senator John Thune to buy Russian missile defense systems from Ankara in order to do what with them? But nothing.

Firstly, Turkey, which is establishing economic relations with the United States during the crisis, is ready to move in this area towards blocking some opportunities for Gazprom, exchanging the gas it supplies for cheap LNG from America. Negotiations on this topic are underway. But military agreements are completely different. It is possible to exchange economic and trade interests in a limited volume, but not guns. The high-tech weapons that Turkey purchases from Russia are a sphere of cooperation in which it is impossible to deviate even a bit from their obligations, because otherwise your reputation as a reliable partner goes to hell. And in the trading contract it is written in black and white that the delivered systems cannot be transferred to third countries.

Secondly, this story goes on too long. Washington has already tried to put pressure on Ankara in a variety of ways to force it to refuse purchases. Turkey was threatened with sanctions, with the exception of NATO, and ultimately banned the delivery of partly already purchased US F-35 aircraft, but Recep Erdogan did not give up an iota. For him, this is a matter of principle: Turkish military-technical policy will not be written under the dictation of Washington.

So, most likely, the Russian senator Oleg Morozov is right, who calls the initiative of John Thune trolling. She has no real prospects, but she must recall the unflagging negative interest of the United States in military cooperation between Turkey and Russia. Another Russian parliamentarian, Vladimir Dzhabarov, suggested that the desire to buy the S-400 is still a very real thing. If this can be done, the Americans want to disassemble the car "to the cogs" in order to improve their own systems. “They don’t have such weapons yet,” he said in an interview with the Moscow Says radio station.

However, this plan is not feasible in principle. S-400s are designed in such a way that an attempt to probe the insides will lead to the failure of the entire complex electronic system, which cannot be cured without Russian specialists.

Such protection is completely logical, since anti-aircraft systems, which are an outstanding achievement of Russian military science and contain many technological solutions inaccessible to others, are delivered to a country that is part of the NATO bloc.

In addition, as Maria Vorobyova, the official representative of the Federal Service for Military-Technical Cooperation, pointed out, Turkey will not be able to transfer anti-aircraft missile systems to the United States without Moscow’s consent: “In order to export military products, the buyer of our equipment must present an end-user certificate to the Russian side. Therefore, its transfer or re-export to third countries without the official permission of the Russian side is impossible. ”

Leonid Slutsky, chairman of the State Duma’s committee on international affairs, ruled out the possibility of a sale, saying: “This is unprincipled, cynical, but I hope it is unlikely to be possible and accepted by the Turkish side.” But even if we assume the incredible: Ankara will decide not to even sell, but simply to negotiate on this topic, even in this case, according to the head of the Duma committee, reputation losses will be prohibitive. “And this is far from the last factor: I think that Turkey is also aware that even a hypothetical discussion of such re-export can complicate bilateral relations with Russia and undermine trust in the framework of strategic partnership,” he emphasized.

As a result, the idea of ​​the American senator looks like nonsense, not connected in any way with reality. However, many American projects have been completed in this style. The fact that one more will be added to them somewhat reduces Trump’s chances of “making America great again”.

The author’s point of view may not coincide with the position of the publisher.