RUSSIA: Not Seeing Eye-to-Eye with US on Missiles

By Kester Kenn Klomegah Reprint | | Print |

Kester Kenn Klomegah

MOSCOW, Mar 18 2008 (IPS) - U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defence Robert Gates have held meetings in Moscow that some foreign policy and military experts say are unlikely to produce significant results.

The talks with Foreign Affairs Minister Sergey Lavrov and Defence Minister Anatoly Serdyukov covered strategic stability, non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, peaceful nuclear cooperation, anti-terrorism initiatives and other international and regional security issues.

In October 2007, the same four failed to agree on missile defence issues at meetings in Moscow. Experts doubt there will be a major diplomatic breakthrough now that President George W. Bush is stepping aside at the year end.

“As the sun sets over the Bush administration, and the sun rises over the Putin-Medvedev regime, Rice and Gates are making a last ditch attempt to salvage what’s left of a severely damaged bilateral relationship,” Ariel Cohen, senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation, a Washington-based political think tank, told IPS. Dmitry Medvedev is Russia’s president-elect.

“They are still smarting from the dressing down (President Vladimir) Putin gave them last time they visited. Yet, there are mutual interests that need to be addressed. This includes the necessity to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.” Cohen said a nuclear Iran is not in either’s interest, and the United States appreciates Russia’s voting in favour of sanctions. But he says much more needs to be done, such as deployment of ballistic missile interceptors in Poland.

“They do not have explosive warheads, do not target Russian territory, and do not diminish – not even by one iota – the might of the Russian nuclear arsenal capable of destroying the United States many times over.”

Military experts say Russian-U.S. diplomatic consultations could help narrow differences, to an extent.

“If in the consultations the U.S. side confirms in written form the earlier verbal proposals, this will definitely be a weighty step towards easing Moscow’s concerns about the U.S.-proposed plan to deploy a third missile launch area in Europe,” General Viktor Yesin, former head of Russia’s Strategic Rocket Forces told Interfax-AVN agency.

According to the expert, the U.S. made a verbal proposal during the two plus two talks in October 2007 which envisioned the presence of Russian officers at missile sites in Poland and in the Czech republic, and the loading of interceptor missiles into silos only after a real missile threat emerges.

But Yesin says that even if these U.S. proposals are implemented, a number of problems will remain.

“I think the key in a solution to the problem of the U.S. global missile shield plan is to be found in implementation of the 2000 Russian-U.S. memorandum on the formation of a joint centre for the exchange of information from early warning and launch notification systems. This would help form a global system to monitor the proliferation of missile technology, and rule out the risk of erroneous response to situations involving ballistic missile launches.”

Alexander Khramchikhin, head of the Institute for Political and Military Analysis in Moscow expects some progress in the consultations.

“If the United States agrees not to load anti-missiles into silos before exact information is received that Iran possesses intercontinental ballistic missiles and Russian experts get an opportunity to control this, one would be able to speak about progress in the talks,” Khramchikhin told local media last week.

A leading parliamentarian told IPS that Russian officials have continuously expressed doubts that the U.S. would deliver its proposals on trust. “Russia has vehemently rejected U.S. proposals simply because of the threat it poses to our country,” IIya Mohamed Ymokhanov, first deputy chairman of the State Duma Foreign Affairs Committee told IPS.

“Media reports that the U.S. could choose Turkey for the deployment of a radar show that a certain shift in position is possible regarding the missile defence issue,” Sergey Rogov, director of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of U.S. and Canada Studies said at the weekend. “The issue could in particular deal with the protection from Iran’s short and medium-range missiles, rather than an invented threat posed by Iran’s non-existing intercontinental ballistic missiles.”