Russia ready to consider possible US trust-building proposals on ABM
Interfax
Moscow, 18 December: Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has announced that Moscow will respond with concrete measures to neutralize the consequences of the deployment of the elements of the American anti-missile defence in Eastern Europe, yet confirmed the readiness for establishing mutual trust.
The creation of "physical infrastructure" of the American anti-missile defence in Eastern Europe "will be followed by a physical and tangible response from us," Lavrov announced in an interview to Ekho Moskvy radio.
"We will be prepared so that all risks that would emerge as a result of the creation of the third positioning area (i.e. the deployment of the USA anti-missile defence in Eastern Europe - Interfax) would be neutralized by us", Lavrov noted.
Along with this, Lavrov stressed, "we are also ready for creating transparency from both sides and, if some kind of trust-building measures are being put forward, we will not turn them down," Lavrov noted.
In the view of Lavrov, "the American administration has firmed up an intention to create the infrastructure in the Czech Republic and Poland - a radar and silos for interceptor missiles".
He thinks that this is the most likely explanation for the disagreement between the written proposals by the USA and the verbal agreements reached during the Russian-American meeting in Moscow in "two-plus-two" format.
"The paper that arrived from the USA does not contain anything that we agreed upon during the meeting in Moscow on 12 October," Lavrov noted with regret.
In particular, he said, the documents received from the USA do not speak of the possibility of "permanent presence of Russian officers in Poland and in the Czech Republic in order to control that the radar was not activated and the interceptor missiles were not loaded into silos".
Lavrov noted that the document contained "only a mention that they could on an one-off basis periodically visit the US anti-missile defence installations and even this could take place only with the agreement of Czech and Polish authorities".
In the written documents, according to the Russian foreign minister, "there are no proposals about joint analysis of data received from our radars but there is a mention that the final decision will be taken by the USA".
"You agree that this is not exactly the same thing," Lavrov noted. "Therefore we expressed disappointment with the documents sent from the USA".