In a tense start to talks on a range of thorny issues, President Vladimir Putin on Friday warned U.S. officials to back off a plan to install missile defenses in eastern Europe or risk harming relations with Moscow.
Addressing Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, the Russian president appeared to mock the U.S. missile defense plan, which is at the center of a tangle of arms control and diplomatic disputes between the former Cold War adversaries.
"We may decide someday to put missile defense systems on the moon, but before we get to that we may lose a chance for agreement because of you implementing your own plans," Putin said in Russian, according to an Associated Press translation.
Putin also said Russia might feel compelled to pull out of a 20-year-old arms control deal unless it is expanded.
Later, at the start of a meeting with Rice and Gates, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov referred to the Americans having presented "detailed proposals" in the Putin talks to address U.S.-Russian differences on missile defense and arms control. He offered no details but said the Russian government is ready to seek compromise.
[...]
The Russian government sees the U.S. missile defense plan, which Washington describes as a hedge against the threat of missile attack from Iran, as a worrisome step toward weakening Russian security. It has been a longstanding dispute, and Putin's remarks seemed to raise the level of tensions.
[...]
After keeping Rice and Gates waiting for 40 minutes, Putin began the session with a lengthy monologue in which he also said that Russia may feel compelled to abandon its obligations under a 1987 missile treaty with the United States if it is not expanded to constrain other missile-armed countries.
Referring to the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces treaty that was negotiated with the United States before the breakup of the Soviet Union, Putin said it must be applied to other countries, including those "located in our near vicinity." He did not mention any by name, but in response, Gates said Washington was interested in limiting missile proliferation in Iran.
Putin said the treaty must be made "universal in nature."
The pact eliminated the deployment of Soviet and American ballistic missiles of intermediate range and was a landmark step in arms control just two years before the fall of the Berlin Wall and later the breakup of the Soviet Union.
"We need to convince other (countries) to assume the same level of obligation as assumed by the Russian Federation and the United States," Putin said. "If we are unable to obtain such a goal ... it will be difficult for us to keep within the framework of the treaty in a situation where other countries do develop such weapon systems, and among those are countries located in our near vicinity."
Putin also has threatened to suspend Russian adherence to another arms control treaty, known as the Conventional Forces in Europe pact, which limits deployments of conventional military forces. Moscow wants it to be revised in ways that thus far have been unacceptable to U.S. and European signatories.
On missile defense, Putin was particularly pointed in his remarks, in which sought to lay out his view of what Rice and Gates should be discussing later Friday with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov.
"We hope that in the process of such complex and multi-faceted talks you will not be forcing forward your relations with the eastern European countries," the president said. He then made his remark about the possibility of one day putting a missile defense system on the moon.
From CNN. There's also another article on Yahoo News.
This is not going to ever make a breakthrough. Russia does not want to make a compromise on this[1]. In fact, they are going to use this as a way of getting out of other obligations that they inherited from the Soviet Union. It is amazing that even with the petrorubles flooding in that they are simply must have a defense built on nuclear weapons of all sorts and the belief that nuclear weapons can be used in a tactical sense. Unfortunately, the whole world is against that. The Neocons here thought that a nuke bunker buster would be a good idea: while I don't have a personal object to them as tactical weapons, they are simply politically infeasible. It helps you NOT AT ALL if the world suddenly slams horribly strict and nasty sanctions on you. It's not even a credible threat then. gah.
1. Please read my post "Why Does Russia Object to NMD in the EU?"
No comments:
Post a Comment