Both sides are looking forward to the seminar on nuclear strategy doctrines that is to be held in Germany in July, as well as to Russia-NATO Council members' attendance, in the observer capacity, at a nuclear emergency exercise in the United Kingdom in September, the communique says.
Speaking at today's session of the Council, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov stressed the need to boost cooperation between his country and the North Atlantic alliance in the TMD area. Specifically, he spoke in favor of making cruise missile defense part of joint missile defense programs. NATO and Russia are now finalizing conceptual approaches to cooperation in this high-tech and sensitive area, he reported.
The Russian minister then went on to acknowledge the existence of a number of unsolved problems in missile defense cooperation between his country and NATO. The transatlantic alliance is about to create a multi-layer TMD system of its own, but Russia still has only a very general idea of that system's structure and of the timeframe put on its construction, Mr Ivanov said. He also lamented that in joint work within the Russia-NATO Council, the alliance's newest developments weren't at all taken into consideration and that the Council relied solely on the anti-missile systems already in operation in Russia and in NATO member states. "We cannot let the results of that work go to waste. They need to be taken into account as much as possible when deciding what the European ABM system should look like," the minister pointed out.
