MOSCOW - In a tense start to talks on a range of thorny issues, President Vladimir Putin on Friday warned U.S. officials to back off a plan to install missile defenses in eastern Europe or risk harming relations with Moscow.
Addressing Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, the Russian president appeared to mock the U.S. missile defense plan, which is at the center of a tangle of arms control and diplomatic disputes between the former Cold War adversaries.
"Of course we can sometime in the future decide that some anti-missile defense system should be established somewhere on the moon," Putin said, according to an English translation. "But before we reach such arrangements we will lose the opportunity for fixing some particular arrangements between us."
Putin also said Russia might feel compelled to pull out of a 20-year-old arms control deal unless it is expanded.
Later, at the start of a meeting with Rice and Gates, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov referred to the Americans having presented "detailed proposals" in the Putin talks to address U.S.-Russian differences on missile defense and arms control. He offered no details but said the Russian government is ready to seek compromise.
"We have differences and there is no need to hide them," Lavrov said.
But both he and Rice said the two countries were committed to bridging those gaps.
"I know that we don't always see eye-to-eye on every element of the solutions to these issues, nonetheless, I believe we will do this in a constructive spirit, that we will make progress during these talks as we continue to pursue cooperation," Rice said.
The Russian government sees the U.S. missile defense plan, which Washington describes as a hedge against the threat of missile attack from Iran, as a worrisome step toward weakening Russian security. It has been a longstanding dispute, and Putin's remarks seemed to raise the level of tensions.......
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