A top Russian general said yesterday that Moscow may
unilaterally opt out of a key Soviet-era arms reduction treaty with
the United States that banned medium-range missiles, Russian news
agencies reported.
General Yuri Baluyevsky, chief of the military's General Staff,
said Russia could pull out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces
Treaty, negotiated between former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev
and former US President Ronald Reagan in 1987.
The decision would depend, he said, on whether the US fulfilled
its plan to deploy missile defense components in Poland and the
Czech Republic plans that have upset Moscow.
"We shall see what our American partners do," Baluyevsky was
quoted by Interfax, ITAR-Tass and RIA Novosti as saying. "Their
actions to deploy missile defense sites in Europe are
inexplicable."
President Vladimir Putin has said he does not trust US claims
that the deployment of missile defense components in Europe was
intended to counter missile threats from Iran, and warned that
Russia would take retaliatory actions.
At a security conference in Munich on Saturday, Putin said the
arms reduction treaty was outdated, and that many nations had since
developed medium-range missiles eliminated by Russia and the United
States.
The statement was part of larger speech in which he assailed US
policy and said that Moscow views NATO's expansion to its borders
as a threat. Relations between Washington and Moscow have been
strained also by disagreements on Iraq and other global crisis, and
by US concerns about Russia's democracy record and that it is
strong-arming ex-Soviet neighbors.
At the time, the 1987 treaty was hailed as a breakthrough that
helped improve security on the continent and end the Cold War.
Under its provisions, the United States destroyed about 850 of its
missiles while the Soviet Union eliminated 1,850 missiles with
ranges of between 500 and 5,500 kilometers.
Baluyevsky said yesterday that the treaty allows both Russia and
the United States to walk out of it. Following on from Putin's
remarks, he said the deployment of medium-range missiles by many
other nations provided a strong argument for leaving the
treaty.
Yuri Solomonov, the head of Moscow-based missile manufacturer
that designed and built the latest Topol-M intercontinental
ballistic missiles, said it was ready to resume the production of
medium-range missiles if such a decision was made by the Kremlin,
the ITAR-Tass news agency reported.
(China Daily February 16, 2007)
