The contracts were signed during visits to Russia by Iraq’s acting defense chief in April, July and August, the document showed. It gave no further details and the state agency in charge of the weapons trade could not be immediately reached.

The Russian newspaper Vedomosti reported late last month that contracts worth $4.3 billion were being agreed ahead of Maliki’s visit. It said they included deals for 30 Mi-28NE combat helicopters and 42 Pantsir-S1 mobile rocket launchers.

A spokesman for Russia’s state-controlled arms exporter, Rosvooruzheniye, said it never discusses content of arms deals.

The contracts comprised the third biggest package of deals for Russian arms sales since the 1991 Soviet collapse, after a $7.5 billion agreement with Algeria in 2006 and a $6 billion sale to Venezuela in 2009, CAST said.

Russia delivered about $13.2 billion in weapons last year, said Konstantin Makiyenko, an expert at CAST.

Pukhov said the Iraq deals showed the government there “is ready to pursue an independent foreign and defense policy”, but that the United States could have tacitly supported them to appease Russia, which scrapped a deal to sell air-defense systems to Iran citing U.N. sanctions over Tehran’s nuclear program.

Russian officials also have said Russia lost about $4 billion in arms deals with Libya because of the fall of longtime leader Muammar Gaddafi, and the future of Russian sales to Syria is uncertain because of the conflict there.

(Additional reporting and writing by Steve Gutterman and Andrew Quinn in Washington; Editing by Timothy Heritage, Diana Abdallah and Cynthia Osterman)