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Gates Presses Russia on Missile
Defense Plan
THOM SHANKER
New
York Times
Monday April 23, 2007
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates pressed the Kremlin’s top
leaders today to accept a detailed new plan for cooperation on missile
defense that he said would make Russia a full partner in the American
effort by sharing information, jointly developing new technology
and even combining their defensive radar systems.
The immediate answer from Russia’s new defense minister,
Anatoly Serdyukov, was a firm statement that the Kremlin had not
dropped its strong opposition to American proposals for anti-missile
bases in Poland and the Czech Republic.
“The Russian position with respect to this issue remains
unchanged,” Mr. Serdyukov said in brief comments to reporters.
“We do believe that deploying all the strategic elements of
the ballistic missile defenses is a destabilizing factor that may
have a great impact upon global and regional security.”
But Mr. Gates was just as firmly undeterred as he opened what will
be a months’-long initiative by the Bush administration to
calm Moscow’s complaints about basing American missile defenses
in former Soviet states to defend European allies and American forces
based there from a potential Iranian attack.
During an evening news conference, Mr. Gates said he believed that
Mr. Serdyukov’s official statement rejecting the new missile
defense proposal had been written prior to today’s meetings.
After a full day of talks with a range of senior Kremlin leaders,
Mr. Gates said he was ending his visit “on a very positive
tone.”
“We made some real headway in clearing up some misunderstanding
about the technical characteristics of the system that are of concern
to the Russians,” Mr. Gates said.
“The key to this is cooperation,” he added. “We
would like to have the Russians as partners in this process. We
would like to share information with them. We are prepared to co-locate
radars with them.”
A joint missile defense effort offers “some real opportunity
here for both sides,” Mr. Gates said. “And that involves
a great deal of transparency on our part — and we are prepared
to do that.”
In one specific action growing out of today’s talks, the
two sides agreed to order a group of Russian and American government
and military experts to address the Kremlin’s questions and
concerns on the American antimissile system formally, Mr. Gates
said.
“I think there are some misunderstandings about some of the
technical characteristics of the radar that would be involved, about
the interceptors and some of their capabilities,” he said.
Mr. Gates said he invited Russian officials to visit the current
American missile defense site in Alaska, and see the non-explosive
interceptors that are similar to the 10 proposed for location in
Poland. And he likewise invited Russian officials to inspect the
American missile tracking radar in California, which is similar
to one proposed for the Czech Republic.
Separately, senior administration officials have said that, with
the permission of the Polish and Czech governments, the Russian
officials also would be allowed routine inspection of any eventual
American missile defense bases on those territories to help quiet
Moscow’s concerns that the sites could be used for offensive
weapons.
The invitations for cooperation laid out to the Russian government,
Mr. Gates said, “went well beyond anything anybody had seen
before in terms of details and scope of what we are talking about.”
In addition to meeting with the new Russian defense minister, Mr.
Gates also had talks with President Vladimir V. Putin and with Sergei
B. Ivanov, the first deputy prime minister who previously served
as minister of defense.
Although he expressed the expected cautious optimism about the
way ahead, Mr. Gates did not deny that significant gaps exist in
American and Russian perceptions of the Iranian threat and, therefore,
over the real purpose of the proposed missile defense sites in Central
Europe.
The Russians, Mr. Gates said, remained skeptical that Iran would
have an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of hitting all
of Europe in the foreseeable future.
But, as a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Mr.
Gates said, he learned that it is a “risky assessment”
to plan national security policy on assumptions that Middle Eastern
states will not gain such military capabilities in the next 10 to
20 years.
Mr. Gates’ arrival in Moscow early today illustrated the
importance the Bush administration now places on calming Kremlin
fears about missile defense. These fears have threatened to rupture
relations between the United States and Russia and have greatly
worried NATO allies.
Mr. Gates had received a dramatic invitation for a visit, delivered
by Mr.Putin, while the two men were attending an international security
conference in Munich earlier this year.
During his conference address, the Russian president, who is a
former senior Soviet intelligence officer, gave an unexpectedly
caustic analysis of American foreign policy, including a harsh critique
of America missile defenses, but concluded by walking across the
conference hall to Mr. Gates’ table, and inviting the American
defense secretary to come to talk to him in Russia.
In the weeks since then, rising tensions with Moscow over missile
defense reached such levels of concern among top Bush administration
officials that Mr. Gates moved his tentative visit up from the fall.
Less than 48 hours after a grueling trip to Iraq, the defense secretary
was back aboard his command airplane for the flight to Moscow on
Sunday.
Mr. Gates has visited Russia only once before, in October of 1992,
when he became the first director of the Central Intelligence Agency
ever to set foot on the soil of America’s cold war adversary.
During that visit, he met with former President Boris N. Yeltsin,
and toured Ysenevo, the suburban headquarters of the KGB First Chief
Directorate, the spy agency’s foreign intelligence section.
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