Moscow, 8 June: The USA reaction to the Russian president's suggested solution to the missile defence issue will reveal Washington's true intentions in locating missile defences in Eastern Europe, Konstantin Kosachev, chairman of the State Duma's international affairs committee, has said. [Passage omitted: Putin yesterday suggested that the USA could use Russia's Qabala radar station in Azerbaijan.]

"It will become clear whether the Americans are really concerned about threats coming from certain regions of the globe from how our American partners react to this Russian proposal, and those threats would then be common threats for both Russia and the USA... [ellipses as published] If that is the case, cooperation between us at the Qabala radar station is absolutely natural and necessary," Kosachev said in an interview with RIA Novosti today.

If the USA accepts the Russian proposal, "accepting it, and of course at the same time rejecting its current plans to locate missile defence components in Poland and the Czech Republic," Moscow and Washington would build a partnership as allies, he added.

"If the Americans turn down this Russian proposal on some pretext, then it will be clear once and for all that the true target of their project is not only a hypothetical Iranian or North Korean threat, but also to limit Russia's nuclear potential, which we could have guessed earlier," said Kosachev. "There is no other explanation for the geographical location of these missile defence components from the point of view of military hardware," he added.

If the USA accepts the Russian initiative it will mark the start of a fundamentally new partnership between Russia and Washington, since "for the first time some basic components of Russian and American missile defence systems will be integrated, and the two systems will start to cooperate rather than compete to counter new threats," Kosachev said.

The Russian president's proposal to the Americans is "a very powerful, far-reaching initiative" and a "proposal of break-through nature", said the politician. This proposal "is not just the event of the year, it's the event of the decade", said Kosachev. "I very much hope that the USA will accept the initiative and will judge it on its merits without getting caught up in technical details," he added.