Growing tension in Georgia after police death at the hands of Russian soldiers
Russia threatened yesterday by pointing missiles at bases hosting U.S. defence system in Poland and Czech Republic, while tensions rose in Georgia.
"... I can not exclude that part of our intercontinental missiles have targeted the facilities of the missile shield in Poland and Czech Republic and potential sites similar," he said in Moscow on general Nikolai Solovtsov, chief of the Russian strategic forces, AFP reported .
Despite the warnings, the Government of the Czech Republic announced shortly after the approval of the military agreement Sofia called on the deployment of U.S. forces in the future based antimissile.
The Czech prime minister, Mirek Topolánek, avoided falling into the Russian provocation.
"I do not intend to contribute to a deterioration (of relations) or a rhetoric of the Cold War. The radar is purely defensive, designed to curb long-range missiles of States' canallas'", a term with which Washington refers to countries deemed a threat to global security, Topolanek said.
As for Poland, the White House signed an agreement in mid-August that provides for the deployment by 2012 of ten interceptors capable of destroying in mid-flight long-range ballistic missiles.
On the eve of a visit to Warsaw, the head of Russian diplomacy, Sergei Lavrov accused the United States to break the military balance with Russia. "Certainly it has not understood that Poland has become part of a very dangerous game. The balance between the military potential of Washington and Moscow has been broken because of U.S." he said.
Lavrov's visit, which will meet today with his Polish counterpart, Radoslaw Sikorski, and the prime minister of Poland, Donald Tusk, is the first of a senior Russian in a country of the European Union (EU) since the beginning August crisis erupted with Georgia.
Meanwhile, in Georgia tension was exacerbated after the death of a policeman hit by gunfire from Georgian Russian soldiers at a checkpoint near the separatist province of South Ossetia, informed the spokesman of the Ministry of Interior, Shota Utiashvili.
EU Mission in Georgia The Russian ambassador to the Organization of the North Atlantic Treaty (NATO), Dmitri Rogozin, said that the civilian observer mission in Georgia in the EU will not enter into the territories of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, but security zones around their respective districts.
The agreement reached by three EU leaders in Moscow only refers to those areas and the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, "it fully understands," said Rogozin, Efe said.
"If there is no mention in the text" to the presence of observers at these sites, then "there is no there," added the ambassador, who stressed that the agreement only mentions the so-called "security zones" in Georgian soil around the two secessionist regions.
