MOSCOW, Feb. 20 — Officials in the Czech Republic and Poland vowed
Tuesday that they would not be intimidated by
Russia, a day after a general in Moscow
declared that nuclear weapons could be aimed at their countries if they
allowed the Bush administration to build ballistic missile defenses
within their borders.
Russia has reacted with open hostility to the plan, which comes on the
heels of further
NATO expansion onto the territory of
the former Soviet Union.
On Monday, the commander of Russia’s missile forces said he was ready to
re-aim nuclear weapons so they would be trained on the missile defense
sites chosen in Eastern Europe.
“It is clearly an attempt to intimidate,” Prime Minister Jaroslaw
Kaczynski, said on Polish radio.
The Czech foreign minister, Karel Schwarzenberg, said, “The Czechs will
now think the shield is even more necessary,” according to a Reuters
report.
“We have quite an experience with Russians,” he said. “You have to make
clear to them you won’t succumb to blackmail. Once you give in to
blackmail, there’s no going back.”
The American plan calls for a radar site in the
Czech Republic and a missile battery in
Poland, with the stated aim of
countering threats from rogue states like Iran or North Korea. Mr.
Kaczynski and his Czech counterpart, Mirek Topolanek, said Monday that
they were prepared to accept the offer from the United States.
The dispute is another sign of how quickly relations between Russia and
Eastern Europe have been disrupted, descending this week and last into
ominous talk of nuclear and military leverage reminiscent of the cold
war.
The Russian missile commander, Gen. Nikolai Y. Solovtsov, speaking of
the Czech Republic and Poland’s consideration of the American plan,
said, “If the government of Poland, the Czech Republic and other
countries make this decision — and I think mutual consultations that
have been held and will be held will allow avoiding this — the strategic
missile troops will be able to have those facilities as targets.
“Consequences in case of hostilities will be very grave for both sides,”
he said.
A NATO spokesman, James Appathurai, called the general’s threat
“uncalled for.”
“The days of talk of targeting NATO territory or vice versa are long
past us.” he said, Radio Free Europe reported. “This kind of extreme
language is out of date.”
Just last week, Russia’s top general, Yuri N. Baluyevsky, the chief of
the general staff, declared that Russia could withdraw from the
Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, negotiated by
Ronald Reagan and
Mikhail S. Gorbachev in 1987.
On Tuesday, General Solovtsov noted that while those missiles were
scrapped under the treaty, Russia could quickly resume production.
President
Vladimir V. Putin set the tone in a
speech on Feb. 10 in Munich, denouncing the projection of American power
as “the world of one master, one sovereign.”
In the 1990s, Russia bristled, but always backed down, as NATO expanded.
But under Mr. Putin, Russia has executed a more forceful foreign policy
in Eastern Europe, though one focused on opening markets for Russian
commodity exports and maintaining political influence in the former
Soviet states.