Russia Wary of U.S. Defense Offer

By Thom Shanker New York Times News Service

MOSCOW — Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates pressed the Kremlin’s top leaders on Monday to accept a detailed new plan for cooperation on missile defense in Europe that he said would make Russia a full partner in the American effort by sharing information, jointly developing new technology and even combining the two countries’ defensive radar systems.

The immediate answer from Russia’s new defense minister, Anatoly E. 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,” 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 Gates was just as firmly undeterred as he opened an initiative by the Bush administration over several months to calm Moscow’s complaints about placing American missile defenses in former Soviet states.

The United States says the bases are necessary to defend European allies and American forces based in Europe from a potential Iranian attack. Russia fears that the missile defense system is meant to deter its weapons.

During an evening news conference, Gates said he believed that Serdyukov’s statement had been written before Monday’s meetings. After a full day of talks with a range of senior Kremlin leaders, 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,” 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,” Gates said. “And that involves a great deal of transparency on our part — and we are prepared to do that.”

In one action growing out of Monday’s talks, the two sides agreed to order a group of Russian and American government and military experts to formally address the Kremlin’s questions and concerns, Gates said.

Gates said that he invited Russian officials to visit the American missile defense site in Alaska and see the nonexplosive interceptors, similar to the 10 proposed for locations in Poland. And he invited the Russians 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 Poland and the Czech Republic, the Russians also would be allowed routine inspection of any eventual American missile defense bases in those countries, to help quiet Moscow’s concerns that the sites could be used for offensive weapons.

The invitations for cooperation laid out for the Russians, 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 defense minister, 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, 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. The Russians, Gates said, remained skeptical that Iran would have an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of reaching all of Europe in the foreseeable future.

The arrival of Gates in Moscow early Monday illustrated the importance the Bush administration places on calming Kremlin fears about missile defense, fears that have threatened to rupture relations between the United States and Russia and have greatly worried NATO allies.

In February, Gates had received a dramatic invitation for a visit, delivered by Putin at an international security conference in Munich. The Russian president gave an unexpectedly caustic analysis of American foreign policy, including a harsh critique of American missile defenses, but he concluded the address by walking across the conference hall to Gates’ table and inviting the American defense secretary to come see him in Russia.

In the weeks since then, rising tensions with Moscow over missile defense had reached such levels of concern among top Bush administration officials that Gates moved his tentative visit up from the fall and, less than 48 hours after a grueling trip to Iraq, the defense secretary was back aboard his government plane for the flight to Moscow on Sunday.

Gordon D. Johndroe, the spokesman for the National Security Council, said that missile defense was also discussed on Monday morning in a phone call between Bush and Putin. Johndroe did not provide details, except to say that the two men talked briefly about Gates’ visit.

Contributing: Jim Rutenberg.

(c) 2007 Deseret News (Salt Lake City). Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.