Kissinger-led U.S. group attends closed debate at Putin home
July 13, 2007
When asked whether U.S. unilateral interventionism was on the agenda, Kissinger said that "nuclear proliferation" and "nuclear threats," rather than U.S. policies, are the biggest danger to world peace.
"I do not think that [U.S.] expansion is a problem of the period. The problem of the period is how to avoid nuclear conflict and in this case we believe that Russia and America should have common objectives."
Apart from Kissinger, the U.S. team includes former Secretary of State George Schultz; former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin; former Special Representative for Arms Control, Nonproliferation and Disarmament Ambassador Thomas Graham, Jr.; former Senator Sam Nunn; and Chevron Chairman and Chief Executive Officer David O'Reilly.
Apart from Primakov, the Russian team includes Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov; former Ambassador to the U.S. Yuly Vorontsov; Deputy Board Chairman of UES Russia Leonid Drachevsky; UC Rusal Deputy Chief Executive Officer Alexander Livshits, and former Soviet Armed Forces Chief of Staff Mikhail Moiseyev.
THE KENNEBUNKPORT FALLOUT
July 4, 2007
Sergei Ivanov (currently first deputy prime minister,and probably next president), warned that Russia would deploy missiles in its westerly exclave, Kaliningrad, if the US did not go along with a Russian proposal to cooperate on a missile defence system in Azerbaijan and southern Russia.
The proposal was made by President Putin at Kennebunkport,
The idea is that instead of putting an anti-missile radar station in the Czech Republic and Poland, Nato and Russia should cooperate in building an anti-missile system in the Gabala radar station that Russia leases from Azerbaijan, and in a unspecified site in southern Russia.
The Russians do not accept US insistence that the Czech and Polish sites are intended as an umbrella for Europe and the US from the threat of Iranian ballistic missiles. Instead, they see the digging of missile silos so close to the Russian border as blatantly aimed neutralising Russia's own nuclear deterrent. If the threat really comes from Iran, Moscow is saying, why not put the counter-measures on the Iranian border?
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