Reports: Russian repeats warning on missile sites

By MIKE ECKEL, Associated Press Writer


MOSCOW — The commander of Russia's strategic missile forces has repeated warnings that Russian ballistic rockets could be aimed at U.S. missile defenses in Europe if the system is ever built, news agencies reported Wednesday.

Col. Gen. Nikolai Solovtsov spoke a day before Russia's foreign minister visits Poland, which has agreed to allow U.S. missile interceptors on its territory.

"I cannot rule out that, in case the top military-political leadership makes such a decision, both the missile defense facilities in Poland and the Czech Republic and other similar facilities in the future could be designated as targets for our ICBMs," Solovtsov was quoted by ITAR-Tass and Interfax as saying.

Poland and the United States reached a deal last month on building the site for 10 U.S. missile interceptors by 2012. Observers said the conclusion of the deal, clinched after months of protracted negotiations, was prompted by Russia's war last month with Georgia, which had alarmed former Soviet bloc countries and others neighboring Russia.

The United States has said the defenses are meant to protect Europe and America from attacks from Iran.

But Russian officials have said repeatedly that they consider the site a threat and have threatened to attack Poland _ a NATO member _ possibly even with nuclear weapons

"These 10 interceptor missiles cannot significantly devalue (Russia's) attack potential, although this will certainly make some negative effect on it. But the point is that the United States doesn't want to take on any legal obligations but is only asserting verbally: we aren't threatening you," Solovtsov was quoted by Interfax as saying.

"They already promised in words when they unified Germany that not a single NATO soldier would be there. And where are they now?" he was quoted as saying.

Foreign Ministry Sergey Lavrov was to go to Poland on Wednesday for talks with Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk and others.

In an interview published Wednesday in the Polska daily, Lavrov said Washington had destabilized the military balance between Russia and the United States and he said Poland, and its decision to host missile defense, had become "an element of a very dangerous game."

"This means that Poland took revenge on us for having defended the Ossetians," he was quoted as saying. "This was a mean action and a political mistake."

"Unfortunately, the Europeans are following voices from outside the continent and are pursuing a policy that is in conflict with European mentality.

Putin Vows 'An Answer' to NATO Ships Near Georgia

By VLADIMIR ISACHENKOV Associated Press Writer

Putin promises Russia will 'answer' increasing number of NATO warships in Black Sea

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said Tuesday that Russia will respond calmly to an increase in NATO ships in the Black Sea in the aftermath of the short war with Georgia, but promised that "there will be an answer."

Meanwhile, President Dmitry Medvedev sternly warned the West that it would lose more than Moscow would if it tried to punish Russia with sanctions over the war with Georgia.

Russia has repeatedly complained that NATO has too many warships in the Black Sea. Foreign Ministry spokesman Andrei Nesterenko said Tuesday that currently there are two U.S., one Polish, one Spanish and one German ship there.

"We don't understand what American ships are doing on the Georgian shores, but this is a question of taste, it's a decision by our American colleagues," Putin reportedly said. "The second question is why the humanitarian aid is being delivered on naval vessels armed with the newest rocket systems."

Russia's reaction to NATO ships "will be calm, without any sort of hysteria. But of course, there will be an answer," Interfax quoted Putin as saying during a visit to Uzbekistan.

Asked by exactly what measures Russia would take in response to NATO ships in the Black Sea, Putin was quoted as answering, "You'll see."


As if to emphasize the country's strength — its control over a growing percentage of European energy supplies — Putin traveled to Uzbekistan to announce a deal that would tighten Russia's hand on Central Asian energy exports to the West.

In an interview with Italy's RAI television broadcast Tuesday, Medvedev said that Russia doesn't fear expulsion from the Group of Eight leading industrialized nations.

"The G-8 will be practically unable to function without Russia, because it can make decisions only if they reflect the opinion of top global economies and leading political players of the world," Medvedev said. "That's why we don't fear being expelled from the G-8."

Presidential candidate John McCain is among those who called for Russia's expulsion from the elite club of the world's richest countries.

Medvedev also warned that NATO would suffer more than Russia if its ties with Moscow were severed.

"We don't see anything dramatic or difficult about suspending our relations if that's the wish of our partners," Medvedev said. "But I think that our partners will lose more from that."

NATO nations depend on Russia as a transit route for supplies going to the alliance's troops in Afghanistan.

At a summit Monday, the European Union issued a declaration saying Russia was violating the terms of its cease-fire with Georgia. It warned that talks on a political and economic agreement with the Kremlin would be postponed unless Russian troops pulled back from positions in Georgia.

Britain and eastern European nations held out for a tougher line, but Europe's dependence on Russian oil and natural gas deterred stronger sanctions.


Russia supplies the EU with a third of its oil and 40 percent of its natural gas — a dependence that the EU's administrative body says will rise significantly in the future.

Putin announced Tuesday that Russia and Uzbekistan will build a new natural gas pipeline that will pump Turkmen and Uzbek gas into Russia's pipeline system, which Russia will re-export to Europe.

The project, which has been under discussions for several months, will strengthen Moscow's hold over Central Asian gas and undermine Western-backed efforts for a rival trans-Caspian route.

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Associated Press writers Mansur Mirovalev and Mike Eckel in Moscow and Constant Brand in Brussels, Belgium, contributed to this report.

Georgian attack is Ossetia's 9/11: Russian maestro

TSKHINVALI, Georgia (Reuters) - Russian conductor Valery Gergiev led a performance of Tchaikovsky among the bombed-out buildings of South Ossetia on Thursday in a concert he said was to alert the world to the region's suffering.

An ethnic Ossetian and one of Russia's best-known musicians, Gergiev lambasted Georgia for shelling the region's capital in a failed assault this month and drew a parallel with the attacks on New York on September 11, 2001.

Gergiev -- who grew up in the neighboring Russian region of North Ossetia -- visited the devastated Jewish Quarter of South Ossetia's capital, Tskhinvali, before conducting a special concert on the town's central square.

"When the U.S. lost three and a half thousand people on September 11th, Russia became the first country to express its support," said Gergiev, referring to the al Qaeda attacks in 2001 which in fact killed nearly 3,000.

"For South Ossetia to lose 1,500 or 2,000 people today is a terrible tragedy but no one knows about it," he said. "To shoot at kids, at children from a tank, it's a shame and the world should know about this shame."

Georgia has denied using excessive forces in its assault, and counters that Russian and its separatist allies have committed abuses against ethnic Georgians who had been living inside South Ossetia.

Dressed in black, Gergiev conducted Tchaikovsky's Fifth and Sixth symphonies on an open-air stage outside Tskhinvali's wrecked parliament building.

RUSSIAN FLAG

Children sat with candles beside policemen as locals waved the Russian flag and two armored personnel carriers kept guard.

Gergiev then conducted Shostakovich's Seventh symphony, loaded with symbolism for Russians who know it as the Leningrad symphony and associate it with the Nazi siege of that city during World War Two.

"I am very hopeful that music will help bring the best of memories and we are here to remember those who died in the tragic days of this aggression," Gergiev said in English.

He said about 2,000 people died in the first days of fighting. Georgia disputes that figure.

Russian forces repelled the Georgian invasion and then pushed further into Georgia, provoking an storm of international criticism. Washington said Moscow's actions had evoked Cold War memories of the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe.

Currently director of the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg, Gergiev was born in Moscow but spent his childhood in North Ossetia.

South Ossetia, a small, pro-Russian province which broke away from Georgian rule in 1992 after a war, says it will ask the Kremlin to recognize it as an independent state.

Eduard Kokoity, South Ossetia's separatist leader, told a rally of several thousand people earlier on Thursday that Georgia had undermined its own statehood by trying to seize his region by force on August 7-8.

Widows and mothers in black, with photographs of their loved ones pinned to their chests, wept as Kokoity lambasted Georgia and its Western backers.

"I have already prepared an address to the president of the Russian Federation ... and to the heads of state of the international community, with a request to recognize our independence," Kokoity said.

(Writing by Guy Faulconbridge; Editing by Giles Elgood)

Overhyping Georgia

The conflict between Russian and Georgia is certainly important -- but the majority of the rhetoric in the United States has been overheated.

By: Matthew Yglesias

The war between Russia and Georgia, which appears -- mercifully -- to have ended, is, of course, a searing experience for the small republic that provoked and then badly lost the war. The consequences for the populations of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, the splinter regions of Georgia whose independence under Russian "protection" (originally declared back in 1991 when Georgia seceded from the USSR) now seems secure, may well prove lasting. And one can at least imagine that the conflict was a huge psychological boost for Russia, which is eager to move beyond the decline of Soviet power. But for the rest of the world, despite a lot of overheated rhetoric to the contrary over the past week, the consequences will be minimal.

Of course not everyone sees it that way. On Monday night's show, CNN Headline News' resident hysteric, Glenn Beck, termed the war a "pivotal moment for the United States of America" claiming prescience for having "been warning people for a while now that Russia is trying to corner the market" on hydrocarbons. Max Boot warned that "the Russian attacks on Georgia, if left unchecked, could easily trigger more conflict in the future … today, Georgia; tomorrow, Ukraine; the day after, Estonia?" John McCain sought to build the sense of crisis, arguing that "world history is often made in remote, obscure countries."

The reality, however, is that world history in the relevant sense isn't made often at all. That's what makes it noteworthy. And it's especially unlikely to be made in remote, obscure countries unless -- as in Sarajevo in 1914 -- major countries use events in obscure ones as a pretext to escalate longstanding conflicts. The idea that the Caucuses clash is an epochal event depends, crucially, on the argument, made notably by Bill Kristol, Robert Kagan, and John Barry, that the Ossetia crisis is equivalent to the Sudetenland crisis of 1938 and that any failure to punish Russia would repeat the mistakes of the Munich agreement when Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement failed to head off further German aggression but did weaken the West’s ability to resist such aggression.

The reality, however, is that Russia has no actual ability to move from Tblisi to Kiev. Georgia is tiny, poor, and geographically located so as to make it difficult for the West to provide it with any practical support. Ukraine has 10 times Georgia's population, 20 times its economic output, and extensive land borders with countries firmly in the Western orbit. The practical impossibility of conquering Ukraine, not American threats, is what will keep the Russians out of Kiev. Meanwhile, it turns out that, contrary to the fears of the hysterics, Russia isn't even going to Tblisi today, much less Ukraine tomorrow or Estonia the day after that. Vladimir Putin, unlike the leader of the United States, is apparently shrewd enough to recognize that military occupations of foreign territories have high costs and scarce benefits.

But while Russia's punishment of Georgia may not have major consequences for America or for world security, a hysterical American response just might. Most obviously, if we were to take things like John McCain's Aug. 12 proclamation that "we are all Georgians" seriously, we would be in the midst of a shooting war with Russia and literally risking the end of human civilization in a nuclear exchange.

By all accounts, McCain just wants to engage in some irresponsible posturing rather than to follow through on the implications of his words, but even excessive posturing and loose talk of a new Cold War with Russia would have real costs. Specifically, both McCain and Barack Obama have recognized that an agreement with Russia related to nuclear-weapons reductions is key to revitalizing the global nonproliferation regime. Russia can't conquer Ukraine or Estonia, but it can play a key role in helping or hindering American efforts to halt the spread of nuclear weapons. And unlike the status of South Ossetia, nuclear proliferation is actually important to the United States. Having frittered away the past seven years on a foreign policy driven by hubris, the United States can ill-afford to misplace its priorities. With the active phase of the war over, we need to move beyond it as quickly as possible to more important issues, not indulge baroque fantasies of renewed great-power conflict.