RUSSIA:RUSSIA HAS outlined a potential deal with the US to avert a crisis over Washington's planned missile defence system in Europe.
Ahead of a bilateral summit on Sunday, a Russian official said the deal, involving a string of safeguards to ensure the system could not be used against his country, would be a stopgap to stop East-West tensions escalating further.
"I believe an agreement is rather close," Konstantin Kosachev, the head of the international affairs committee of the Russian state Duma, said yesterday.
A deal on missile defence, as part of a new "strategic framework" due to be negotiated at Sunday's summit at the Russian Black Sea resort of Sochi, would give both sides breathing room and draw some of the poison from US-Russian relations before Vladimir Putin steps down from the presidency on May 7th.
American sources said the Russian proposals would require careful thought. "It's too early for sure to say what the administration will decide," said a former senior US official, who did not want his name used.
President George Bush insists the system is a shield against a potential Iranian missile attack on Europe or the US. Moscow portrays it as an effort to blunt Russia's nuclear deterrent.
Officials on both sides say the row is the biggest factor behind the current East-West chill.
Mr Bush yesterday won two important bargaining counters ahead of Sunday's Sochi encounter with Putin and his successor Dmitry Medvedev.
At a Nato summit in Bucharest, the US gained formal Nato support for the anti-ballistic missile scheme and formally nailed down one of its two main elements, an agreement with the Czech government to build a missile-tracking radar on its soil.
The other half of the project, the deployment in Poland of 10 interceptors designed to knock incoming missiles out of the sky, has yet to be finalised.
Mr Kosachev sketched Moscow's negotiating position. "We have a maximum programme - construct a system together to defend us all; and a minimum programme - technological guarantees that it can't be used against us," he said, at a conference at the fringes of the Nato summit organised by the German Marshall Fund. He said a deal on Russia's "minimum" programme was within reach.
Later he said: "We need to exclude the technical possibility to use both systems against Russia. In Poland that means not putting the missiles into the silos unless convinced Iran has the capability to launch their missiles."
The former senior US official said the Russian deal involved costs and uncertainties for the US. Such an agreement, for example, would leave it unclear who decides when Iran has mastered medium- or long-range missile technology.
"Are we ready for a deal just to get through this crisis, but which is just delaying the inevitable? And that is Americans waking up one day and telling the Russians the Iranians have the capacity and Russians saying 'we don't agree'," the American source said.