Azerbaijan: Russian navy visits Baku

Certainly planned for a long time, but nevertheless to be seen in the context of the invasion of the Armenian-populated enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan: an informal friendly visit by the frigate Tatarstan to the harbour of Bakú, the capital of Azerbaijan. Even if only for two days with an emphatically culturally guided tour of the city and a football match, it was an unmistakable signal from Moscow shortly after the military intervention and the expulsion of the ethnic Armenian inhabitants of the region.

The FK frigates Tatarstan and Dagestan are two variants of the Gepard class (project 11661, 102 m, 2000 tonnes), which were planned in the early 1990s as successors to the Koni class, mainly for export. Of the five variants, only these two ships were completed in the course of the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and the associated tight finances and were assigned to the Caspian Flotilla due to a lack of buyers. In October 2015, the Dagestan fired its first Kalibr cruise missiles (SS-N-30) from the Caspian Sea against land targets 800 to 1000 kilometres away in Syria - over Iran and Iraq.