August 14, 2007 (LPAC)--"This is what we call modern development of the Armed Forces,'' Russian President Valdimir Putin remarked at the ceremony on August 11, inaugurating an up-graded early warning radar station, outside St. Petersburg. The phased-array antenna, electronics, and other new components increases the station's observational reach from an area at the North Pole to the south of Africa. Putin praised former Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov for his attention to the modernization of the Armed Forces.

This new generation of stations of the Voronezh type is replacing older ones, and is also the model for a similar station being built in Armavir, in southern Russia, which President Putin proposed to President Bush be used as an element of a joint ballistic missile defense system.