Putin To Suspend Pact With NATO

With all our attention in the Middle East we have forgotten to keep an eye on an even bigger threat, one that actually has the ability to attack and not with our own airplanes.

New York Times April 27, 2007
By C. J. Chivers and Mark Landler

President Vladimir V. Putin said Thursday that Russia would suspend its compliance with a treaty on conventional arms in Europe that was forged at the end of the cold war, opening a fresh and intense dispute in the souring relations between NATO and the Kremlin.

The announcement, made in Mr. Putin’s annual address to Parliament, underscored the Kremlin’s anger at the United States for proposing a new missile defense system in Europe, which the Bush administration insists is meant to counter potential threats from North Korea and Iran.

Mr. Putin suggested that Russia would use its future compliance with the treaty as a bargaining point in that disagreement with the United States.

The new standoff also demonstrated the Kremlin’s lingering frustration over NATO’s expansion toward Russia’s borders and with the treaties negotiated in the 1990s when Russia, still staggering through its post-Soviet woes, was much weaker and less assertive on the world stage than it is today.

Although Mr. Putin did not mention it on Thursday, Russia is angry that in 2001 the Bush administration unilaterally pulled out of the Antiballistic Missile Treaty of 1972.

On Monday, Mr. Putin’s defense minister, Anatoly E. Serdyukov, rejected an offer from the visiting American defense secretary, Robert M. Gates, to share antimissile technology, which had been intended as a way to assuage Moscow’s opposition to Washington’s missile defense plan.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, speaking in Oslo at a gathering of diplomats from NATO countries, reacted coldly to Mr. Putin’s speech.

“These are treaty obligations, and everyone is expected to live up to treaty obligations,” she said.

Ms. Rice also dismissed Russian concerns that introducing new military technology to Europe could upset the balance of forces there and set off an escalation that could lead to a new cold war. She called such claims “purely ludicrous” and said the scale of the proposed missile defense system was obviously far too small to defend against the Russian nuclear arsenal.

Treaty obligations Secretary Rice? Say like...the Geneva Conventions or something of that nature? Excuse me, Ms. Kettle, there is a Mr. Pot calling on line 3.