Agence France-Presse,
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice forcefully rejected talk of a new Cold War with Russia as she arrived in Moscow Monday for negotiations aimed at halting a dramatic slide in relations.
Rice, who is to meet President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday, said that despite the harder stance by both sides, any suggestion that US-Russian relations could become as bad as they were with the Soviet Union “have no basis whatsoever.”
Rice said her discussions would cover a host of problematic issues, including plans to station US anti-missile bases in eastern Europe and US backing for independence for Serbia's breakaway Kosovo province.
The top US diplomat said she would press US concerns over anti-democratic developments in Russia and “heavy-handed” moves by Moscow against some former Soviet bloc neighbours.
Putin, who is to meet US President George W. Bush during a Group of Eight summit next month in Germany, has aggressively railed against US policy in recent months.
Last week he made a speech interpreted by some analysts as comparing US foreign policy “diktats” to the actions of the Third Reich in Nazi Germany.
Rice lamented the recent tone from the Kremlin.
“I don't like the rhetoric either, and I think that it's extremely important, and I've said this to my counterparts, to not use rhetoric that suggests that the relationship is one of hostility,” she said.
But Rice went on to insist that despite the “complexity” of US-Russian ties, parallels drawn by some Russian officials with the Cold War era before the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union were misplaced.
“People throw around terms like a new Cold War,” Rice told reporters accompanying her to Moscow.
“As somebody who came out of that period, as a specialist in it, I think the parallels just frankly have no basis whatsoever,” Rice said, referring to her academic training as Soviet specialist.
“Russia is not the Soviet Union, and so this is not a US-Soviet relationship, this is a US-Russian relationship,” she said.
Rice noted that Moscow and Washington were working together through the United Nations on the Iranian and North Korean nuclear threats, on Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts, on non-proliferation and to support Russia's bid to join the World Trade Organisation.
But she showed little inclination to give in to Russian concerns over Kosovo, missile defense and the steady expansion of the US-led NATO military alliance into erstwhile Soviet satellites.
Moscow has sharply criticised US plans to place 10 anti-missile interceptors in Poland and a tracking radar in the Czech Republic as a threat to its own strategic defences.
In response, Putin announced last month that he was suspending Russian compliance with a key East-West arms pact, the CFE treaty.
Rice said the United States had made some “very forward-leaning proposals” to Russia for missile defense cooperation, which Washington insists is aimed not at Russia's missile forces but at countering “emerging threats” from North Korea and Iran.
“This is not going to somehow undermine strategic stability in the Cold War sense. It's going to enhance strategic stability because it would deny to these states that are trying to develop these technologies the ability to use them to threaten or to blackmail,” she said.
On moves to separate Kosovo from Serbia, a close Moscow ally, Rice said the US remained “strongly supportive” of a UN plan to grant supervised independence to the ethnic-Albanian-majority province despite threats of a Russian veto.
Rice signalled her intent to press Putin on what she has called a worrying concentration of power in the Kremlin at the expense of democratic institutions, including a free press and judiciary.
“We've been very clear that we have concerns about internal developments in Russia and we're going to continue to talk about that,” said Rice, who is due to meet with Russian non-governmental organizations on Tuesday in a show of support for the groups.
Such talk led Russia's Kommersant newspaper to write Monday that Moscow and Washington had lost all trust and now see each other as threats.
Rice's visit “begins a new phase in… relations. As in the days of the USSR, Washington will be guided by a doctrine of 'strategic patience',” the paper said.
Despite her avowed commitment to continuing “intensive” dialogue with Moscow, Rice acknowledged that “it's not an easy time for the relationship.”
“But it's also not a time in which I think any sort of cataclysmic things are happening,” she said.
“It's mixed — there are some things that are going very well, some things that are going less well that we expected and some things that are very problematic,” she said.
“It's critically important to use this time to enhance those things that are going well and to work on those things that are not going well,” she said.
