FILE - In this file photo taken on Tuesday, Aug. 18, 2009, a Russian Yak-130 training jet is seen at MAKS-2009 (the International Aviation and Space Show) in Zhukovsky, Russia. Business daily Kommersant... (Associated Press) 
 
 FILE - In this file photo taken on Tuesday, Aug. 18, 2009, a Russian Yak-130 training jet is seen at MAKS-2009 (the International Aviation and Space Show) in Zhukovsky, Russia. Business daily Kommersant... (Associated Press) 
 
 Russia has signed a contract to sell combat jets to Syria, a newspaper reported Monday, in apparent support for President Bashar Assad and open defiance of international condemnation of his regime's bloody crackdown. 
 
 The respected business daily Kommersant, citing an unidentified source close to Russia's Rosoboronexport state arms trader, said the $550-million deal envisions the delivery of 36 Yak-130 aircraft. A spokesman for Rosoboronexport refused to comment on the report. 
 
 If confirmed, the deal would cement Russian opposition to international efforts to put pressure on Assad's regime over its attempts to snuff out the country's uprising. The U.N. says more than 5,400 people have died over 10 months. The report of the sale comes the same day that Human Rights Watch called Russia's backing of the Syrian regime "immoral." 
 
 The Yak-130 is a twin-engined combat trainer jet that can also be used to attack ground targets. The Russian air force has recently placed an order for 55 such jets. 
 
 Russia's Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said last week that Moscow doesn't consider it necessary to offer an explanation or excuses over suspicions that a Russian ship had delivered munitions to Syria despite an EU arms embargo. 
 
 Russia was acting in full respect of international law and wouldn't be guided by unilateral sanctions imposed by other nations, he said. 
 
 Lavrov also accused the West of turning a blind eye to attacks by opposition militants and supplies of weapons to the Syrian opposition from abroad and warned that Russia will block any attempt by the West to secure United Nations support for the use of force against Syria. 
 
 Russia has been a strong ally of Syria since Soviet times when the country was led by the president's father Hafez Assad. It has supplied Syria with aircraft, missiles, tanks and other modern weapons. 
 
 Igor Korotchenko, head of the Center of Analysis of the Global Arms trade, an independent think-tank, said the jet deal apparently reflected Moscow's belief that Assad would stay at the helm. 
 
 "With this contract, Russia is expressing confidence that President Assad would manage to retain control of the situation, because such deals aren't signed with a government whose hold on power raises doubts," Korotchenko was quoted by RIA Novosti news agency as saying. "It's another gesture by Moscow underlining its confidence that Damascus will remain its strategic partner and ally in the Middle East." 
 
 Another Moscow-based military analyst, Ruslan Pukhov, said, however, that Russia might be too optimistic about Assad's prospects. 
 
 "This contract carries a very high degree of risk," Pukhov told Kommersant. "Assad's regime may fall and that would lead to financial losses for Russia and also hurt its image." 
 
 Human Rights Watch warned Russia that by supporting Assad it is repeating the mistakes of some Western governments during the Arab Spring, saying they were too slow to recognize the popular desire for democratic change in places like Egypt and Bahrain. 
 
 "Armed elements shooting at government soldiers is materially different from government representatives shooting deliberately at unarmend civilians," Carroll Bogert, the group's deputy executive director, said at a news conference in Moscow that followed the release of HRW's annual report. 
 
 She added that the overwhelming number of victims in Syria is on the side of the demonstrators. 
 
 "The continued support of this regime is immoral and not permissible," Bogert said. "The West has already made serious mistakes with the support of Arab regimes. Russia's repetition of those mistakes will lead to tragic consequences." 
 
 ____ 
 
 Sofia Javed in Moscow contributed to this report. ||||| A Shi'ite anti-government protester holds up a poster of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad during a demonstration against Israeli air strikes in Syria, in Sanaa May 10, 2013. 
 
 BEIRUT Syria has received the first shipment of a sophisticated air defense system from Russia, President Bashar al-Assad was quoted as saying, sending a signal of military strength days before an EU arms embargo on the country lapses. 
 
 Russia had promised delivery of the S-300 missile system to the Syrian government despite Western objections, saying the move would help stabilize the regional balance at a time of insurgency in Syria waged by Western-backed rebels. 
 
 Moscow is a staunch ally of Assad and it has appeared to grow more defiant since the European Union let its arms embargo on Syria expire as of June 1, opening up the possibility of the West arming the Syrian rebels. 
 
 "Syria has received the first shipment of Russian anti-aircraft S-300 rockets," Lebanese newspaper al-Akhbar newspaper quoted Assad as saying in an interview due to be broadcast later on Thursday. 
 
 More of the missiles would arrive soon, he was quoted as saying. 
 
 A source close to Russia's Defense Ministry said there had been a "bank transfer" in connection with the S-300 transaction but that Russian banks were becoming increasingly nervous about dealing with Assad. 
 
 "There were some problems with payments because big Russian banks were scared of dealing with Assad, but there was a bank transfer," the source said. "There are also not big banks and banks that are not based in Moscow. Beyond the down payment there was almost certainly a second payment, maybe a third." 
 
 Last year, a source close to Russia's weapons export monopoly Rosoboronexport said Syria had paid 20 percent of the contract price, but that the S-300 deal was frozen because of the country's civil war. 
 
 The United States, France and Israel have all called on Russia to stop the missile delivery. 
 
 More than 80,000 people have been killed in Syria since peaceful protests against four decades of Assad family rule morphed into a civil war, pitting the president's forces and his ally, Hezbollah, against Syrian rebels and a flow of Sunni Islamist militants who have come to help them from abroad. 
 
 Moscow says the expiry of the EU embargo complicates U.S. and Russian-led efforts to set up a peace conference between the Syrian government and its opponents, who demand an immediate end to Assad family rule. 
 
 GENEVA 2 CONFERENCE 
 
 The interview with Assad was to be released on Thursday on Al Manar, a television station linked to Assad's ally, the Shi'ite Muslim militant group Hezbollah. 
 
 Assad said he planned to go to the "Geneva 2" conference, al-Akhbar reported, though he was unconvinced of a fruitful outcome and pledged to continue fighting the uprising. 
 
 Officials in Israel, the United States' main ally in the region, say the S-300 could reach deep into the Jewish state and threaten flights over its main commercial airport near Tel Aviv. 
 
 Al-Akhbar said Assad also stressed ties between his forces and Hezbollah militants now openly fighting on the Syrian side of the Lebanese-Syrian frontier. "Syria and Hezbollah are part of the same axis," al-Akhbar quoted him as telling al-Manar. 
 
 "The Syrian army is the one fighting and leading the battles against the armed group, and this fight will continue until all those who are called terrorists are eliminated." 
 
 Syria straddles the fault lines of several regional and sectarian conflicts, and the violence in the country is increasingly seeping across its borders. 
 
 Israel, wary of any Syrian weapons being sent to Hezbollah in Lebanon, has already carried out three air strikes against Damascus to stop suspected transfers. 
 
 A recent series of strikes in Damascus, which shook the entire capital, stoked an angry reaction from Syria. State media outlets said Syria would respond to any further attacks and would also allow militant groups to attack Israel from a shared border on the Golan Heights. 
 
 Israel captured much of Syria's Golan Heights in a 1967 war and occupies the territory today, but Assad and his father, the deceased president Hafez al-Assad, had kept the border quiet for decades. 
 
 "The Syrian government will not stand in the way of any Syrian groups that want to wage a war of resistance to liberate the Golan," Assad was quoted as saying in the interview. 
 
 Hezbollah has said it is willing to support groups that chose to launch operations from the Golan. 
 
 Israel has become particularly wary of the S-300 shipments although Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon said on Tuesday that the shipments were not yet on their way. 
 
 Earlier this month, Israel was reported to have told Washington that Syria had begun payments for a $900 million purchase of S-300s, with an initial deliver due within three months. 
 
 (Additional reporting by Thomas Grove in Moscow; Editing by Mark Heinrich)
– Russia has rejected calls to stop arming and training Bashar al-Assad's regime, despite evidence that its weapons are being used against civilians. "Russia enjoys good and strong military technical co-operation with Syria, and we see no reason today to reconsider it," Russia's deputy defense minister said yesterday, insisting that existing contracts will be honored. The two countries have been closely linked for decades and Syria hosts Russia's only naval base outside the former Soviet Union, the Independent notes. The evidence is mounting as to how brutal Syria's crackdown on the year-old uprising has been: In a report out today, Amnesty International found that Assad's regime regularly tortures prisoners using sticks, rifle butts, cords, and sexual assault, reports the AP. In addition to the 7,500 estimated killed so far, the crackdown continues to claim dozens of lives daily and human rights groups say land mines have been planted along the routes refugees are using to flee the violence. Assad's forces have now recaptured most of Idlib, a rebel stronghold near the border with Turkey that had been held by hundreds of military defectors, the AP reports.