Russia may drop out of arms-reduction treaty

Russia may drop out of arms-reduction treaty
Copyright by The Associated Press
Published: February 15, 2007


MOSCOW: A top Russian general said Thursday that Moscow might unilaterally drop out of a key Soviet-era arms reduction treaty with the United States that had banned medium-range nuclear 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 the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and President Ronald Reagan in 1987.

The decision would depend, he said, on whether the United States completed plans to deploy components of missile defense systems in Poland and the Czech Republic — plans that have drawn sharp criticism from President Vladimir Putin.

"We shall see what our American partners do," Baluyevsky was quoted as saying by Interfax, ITAR-Tass and RIA Novosti. "Their actions to deploy missile defense sites in Europe are inexplicable."

Putin has said he does not trust American claims that the planned European missile-defense system is intended to counter threats from Iran, and he has warned that Russia would take retaliatory measures.

At a security conference in Munich on Saturday, Putin said that the arms reduction treaty was outdated and that many nations had since developed their own medium-range missiles, a type eliminated by Russia and the United States.

Relations between Washington and Moscow have been strained by Russia's opposition to what Putin called an "overly aggressive American foreign policy." Moscow has been particularly critical of the U.S. intervention in Iraq.

The United States, meanwhile, is concerned about what it says is the erosion of political freedoms in Russia and by what it sees as Moscow's use of its vast oil and natural gas reserves to reward friends and punish foes.