MOSCOW (AP) - Russia's efforts to build closer ties with the United States and NATO shouldn't damage its relations with China, which views stronger cooperation between Moscow and the West as a positive development, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov said Monday.
"I explained to Beijing the essence of the documents signed, and the response was positive and showed understanding," Ivanov told reporters in Moscow after returning from Beijing, according to the Interfax-Military News Agency.
Ivanov, who met with Chinese President Jiang Zemin and other Chinese officials, said closer ties with the United States and a new agreement with NATO "doesn't do any harm to the Asian vector of the Russian policy."
He noted that Russia's state emblem, the double-headed eagle, symbolizes its policy of forging close ties with both the East and West. "There must be no tilts in foreign policy," he said.
Although China has not criticized the agreement making Russia a limited NATO partner, it has in the past dismissed the alliance as a Cold-War relic that has no reason to exist.
Moscow and Beijing have continuously described their cooperation as a strategic partnership intended to offset the purported American dominance in global affairs. Last July, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Jiang signed a friendship treaty formalizing the burgeoning ties between the two nations after decades of Cold War rivalry.
Since Sept. 11, however, Russia's rhetoric about the need to build a "multipolar world" has given way to Putin's energetic efforts to befriend the United States and other Western countries. Putin gave a quick blessing to the U.S. military deployment in formerly Soviet Central Asian nations for operations in Afghanistan - the move that has irked China, nervous about the U.S. thrust into the resource-rich, strategically placed region near its borders.
Some Russian politicians and the media have voiced concern about a growing pro-western tilt in Putin's foreign policy, saying that it could hurt relations with China.
"Moscow has become too much absorbed in playing a game in the Russia-United-States-Europe triangle, and isn't paying enough attention to improving relations with a stronger China," the daily Nezavisimaya Gazeta said in a front-page commentary Monday.
It said Ivanov had ignored several high-ranking Chinese military delegations that visited Moscow, and only visited China after continuous pressure from Beijing - to the strong dismay of the Chinese military.
The newspaper warned that cooling in Russian-Chinese ties could affect military cooperation between the two countries. Since the 1991 Soviet collapse, China has become the top customer of the ailing Russian weapons industry, buying billions of dollars worth of fighter jets, missiles, submarines and destroyers.
Russia's arms exports to China total about dlrs 1 billion a year, Interfax-Military News Agency said Monday. It said the latest dlrs 1.5 billion deal signed last month envisaged the delivery over five years of eight Russian upgraded Kilo-class missile-armed diesel submarines.