MOSCOW, Nov 11: Moscow sent a strong signal to Washington on Tuesday that it would not rush to deploy its tactical missiles near the Polish border if its former Cold War foe scrapped plans to station a missile shield in east Europe.
Washington says the missile defence shield, which would consist of 10 interceptor missiles in Poland and a radar in the Czech Republic, would help protect the United States and its European allies from a missile attack by countries like Iran.
Moscow has repeatedly said the US plan is a direct threat to Russia’s national security.
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev pledged last week to deploy Iskander tactical missiles in the Kaliningrad region bordering Poland in response to the plan to place the US missile system in eastern Europe.
Iskanders will be deployed “only in case the third positioning region will take a real physical shape,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told a news conference on Tuesday after talks with his Finnish counterpart Alexander Stubb.
“We declared through the words of our president: if the third positioning region ... is created physically, one of the physical measures to neutralise the inevitably emerging threats to Russia’s security will be to deploy Iskander systems in the Kaliningrad region,” Lavrov said.
The European Union has expressed “strong concern” over Moscow’s plan to deploy the Iskander systems near Poland.
“When US plans...became a subject of talks with Warsaw and Prague, we turned the attention of our EU partners at earlier summits to the fact that these problems had an effect on our dialogue with the European Union in the sphere of European security,” Lavrov said.
Russia and the EU will hold their next summit on Friday.
TALKS WHEN OBAMA IN OFFICE: Lavrov said at the weekend that Russia hoped for constructive talks with the next US president, Barack Obama.
Lavrov said proposals Moscow had received from the outgoing US administration to ease its concerns over the US missile plan “fall short of the agreements reached earlier at the level of the presidents.”
Obama, who won the Nov 4 election by a landslide, has supported work on the missile defence shield, but says it must be “pragmatic and cost-effective” and cannot divert resources from other priorities until its effectiveness is proven.
Russia says Iran and other nations seen by Washington as “rogue” states have no technologies to build long-range missiles in the near future, while the US missile system in Europe would put Russia’s own security at risk.
Lavrov said the planned missile shield should not be viewed simply as separate bilateral issues between Washington and the capitals of the planned sites — Warsaw and Prague.
“We have ... to consider real but not assumed threats to Europe and take decisions collectively, not unilaterally,” Lavrov said.
“We need a common, collective approach, and then we will have no fears.”—Reuters
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