A meeting of the Russia-NATO Council chiefs of staff planned for Wednesday in Brussels is important because it should clarify what kind of a missile defense system the U.S. and NATO are planning to build, said Dmitry Rogozin, the Russian permanent envoy to NATO and the head of the presidential interagency working group for interaction with NATO on missile defense.
"The negotiations on missile defense have two aspects, namely political agreements that the nascent system will not be targeted against Russian interests and military knots that could be tied to increase the interaction capital," he said.
The negotiations between the chiefs of staff should "clarify the U.S.’ and NATO’s intentions regarding what they are actually going to build. They either plan to create a machine capable of safeguarding European countries from single launches of short- and medium-range missiles from the south, or their ambitions are so big that the matter implies the building of a global and multi-layered defense system, for which there is no other enemy in the world but the Russian Federation," he said.
"It is necessary once again to clarify the viewpoint of the American and NATO military establishment to see whether they are going, in neutralizing the growing threats, to create additional new threats that are even more challenging to them and to us, or whether the military men, who are closer to military actions and military practices than civilians, will bear their part of great responsibility for looking for a compromise," Rogozin said.
