Russian President Dmitry Medvedev warned on Wednesday that he would consider countermeasures if the United States goes ahead with a plan to build a missile defence shield in Eastern Europe.
Medvedev said a deal on the missile plan signed this week between the US and the Czech Republic ”offends us greatly”.
”Russia isn’t going to get hysterical but will be studying countermeasures,” Medvedev told reporters after a summit of Group of Eight leaders, including US President George Bush, in the northern Japanese town of Toyako.
Washington says it needs to base interceptor missiles in former Soviet bloc states to form a shield to stop possible attacks by states like Iran or North Korea. But Russia has seen the move as an affront.
”We have stressed numerous times that issues of European security should be settled in a different way,” Medvedev said.
Moscow had offered joint Russian-Nato sites to track any missile threats.
”Unfortunately there was no reaction to that. Our negotiations were rather weak and led to nothing,” he said. — AFP
