On May 7, 2025, the new armored vehicles “Taimas” and “Aibar” took part in the parade in Astana. It was officially announced that this was a domestic development and production is in Kazakhstan.
But in fact, these combat vehicles are nothing more than a repainted Turkish armored vehicle COBRA II. Moreover, it turned out that they were imported to the country already finished – there was no assembly in our country.
The scheme was organized through the Astana MPR Project company, which was recently excluded from the register for failure to fulfill the state defense order. But suddenly it was again included in the register by a strange court decision.
The company is a member of the Free Economic Zone, which exempts it from customs duties and provides other benefits.
The company has no production facilities or specialists – but it regularly wins tenders for defense orders.
As a result of the armored car scam, Kazakhstan not only lost billions of dollars, but also failed to obtain localization of armored car production. There is not even a large-unit assembly of COBRA II under a Turkish license.
We present a video from the YouTube channel of the independent media resource Elmedia Kazakhstan.
