Wednesday, May 14, 2003
Russia-NATO defence pact for Europe
By Vladimir Radyuhin
MOSCOW MAY 13. Russia and NATO have agreed to jointly build a missile-defence shield for Europe. A Russia-NATO council meeting at Ambassadors' level in Moscow on Tuesday approved the first phase of a cooperation programme to deploy a non-strategic anti-missile defence in Europe, the Itar-Tass news agency said quoting the NATO Secretary-General, George Robertson. Speaking at a news conference after the meeting, Mr. Robertson described the missile-defence project, proposed by Russia, as "maybe the flagship programme in the NATO-Russia council,'' whereas a year and a half ago it was "one of the most divisive issues.''
The NATO chief said Russia and the Atlantic alliance had worked together on "an agenda of solid concrete and productive cooperation,'' which covered the fight against terrorism, peacekeeping operations, and the evaluation of threats of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, particularly nuclear. The Russian Foreign Minister, Igor Ivanov, said the Russia-NATO Council, set up a year ago should strive to "achieve a security architecture of the Euro-Atlantic type'' with a stress on multilateral arrangement. He called for a Russia-NATO dialogue on Afghanistan in the context of the alliance's growing peacekeeping role in post-war reconstruction of Afghanistan. Russia's relations with NATO, strained over the alliance's expansion into Eastern Europe, improved rapidly after Moscow backed Washington in its post-11/9 global war on terrorism.
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