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NATO Flight Plan Awakens Russians' Ire
Nikolaus von Twickel - Moscow Times - themoscowtimes.com - 4.11.12 - JRL 2012-67

A NATO plan to turn an airport in Ulyanovsk into a hub for transporting cargo from Afghanistan has put the Kremlin in the unusual position of trying to explain how doing business with the Western alliance that has long been Russia's foe can be profitable for the country. NATO Meeting File Photo
file photo

The tricky situation heated up last weekend when a group of Communist activists set up tents close to Ulyanovsk's Vostochny Airport and declared a hunger strike in protest against the proposed move they view as selling out the country's strategic heartland to the West.

The city on the Volga is named after Vladimir Lenin, who was born as Vladimir Ulyanov 142 years ago in the city that was then known as Simbirsk.

On Tuesday, the Communists vowed they would never let Western military interests encroach so deep into Russia.

"Next to Ulyanovsk are Samara and Nizhny Novgorod, the country's military-industrial centers," Communist Deputy Anatoly Lokot told the State Duma, Interfax reported.

Lokot also attacked Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov - who has said letting NATO use the airport would be economically profitable - by saying his argument amounted to trading away national security.

"We won't let anybody trade with [our] territory," Lokot was quoted as saying.

Notably, the Communists have been joined by opposition activists from both sides of the political spectrum - nationalist poet Eduard Limonov and Left Front leader Sergei Udaltsov.

Last week, Limonov's Other Russia movement staged a spectacular protest, during which activists set off orange signal flares and held up a huge banner reading "Foreign Ministry - traitors' den" outside the ministry's landmark skyscraper.

Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has stressed that the proposal included no plans for a military base and that Ulyanovsk would only serve as a transit hub under full Russian control and with no NATO personnel, either civil or military.

Lavrov's deputy Alexander Grushko even argued that rather than a hub, the talks with NATO centered on "temporary depots" for strictly commercial shipments of "nonlethal goods," RIA-Novosti reported.

Left Front leader Udaltsov, currently on hunger strike in solidarity with Astrakhan opposition leader Oleg Shein, said he sympathized with the criticism and had little trust in such public assurances.

"Our officials have fooled us too often before," he told The Moscow Times on Tuesday. Udaltsov added that a plan as vital as that should be put to a referendum.

"Anything regarding foreign troops on our territory should be decided by the people," he said.

The opposition criticism was ridiculed by Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin, who oversees the defense industry and declared last month that "the transit of NATO toilet paper" cannot amount to treason.

Writing on Facebook late Monday, he called the Ulyanovsk protests the "most absurd possible," arguing that they resembled "Alaskan Aleuts taking a vow of silence in protest against a rams' testicles surplus in the Antarctic."

The government has said a deal with NATO would bring much-n