By RIA Novosti
Bishkek (Kyrgyzstan) : US plans to deploy missile defences in Central Europe may affect the situation in Asia, the Russian foreign minister said Monday.
"We have not discussed specifically the situation around the US missile shield in Europe, but we realise that this region (Central Asia) will certainly feel the consequences of these unilateral actions," Sergei Lavrov said at a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) in the capital of Kyrgyzstan.
The SCO was set up a decade ago to deal with Islamic extremism and other security threats in Central Asia, but has since expanded its scope to include cooperation in disaster relief and trade.
It currently comprises Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and China, with observer status for Iran, Pakistan, India and Mongolia.
US plans to place elements of its missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic have become one of the main issues of contention in relations between Russia and the US, bringing them recently to their lowest point since the Cold War.
In an initial response to the US move, Moscow threatened to point Russian warheads at Europe and pull out of a conventional arms reduction treaty, the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty (CFE), but seemingly softened its stance when Putin proposed at a Group of Eight leading industrialised nations summit in Germany to jointly use the Gabala radar in the former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan.
During his informal talks with US president George W. Bush last week, the Russian president proposed that the US jointly use the radar being built in southern Russia, in addition to the missile early warning facility in Gabala.
The White House welcomed the Russian initiatives but so far has not shown any signs that it would drop its European missile shield plans, with experts seriously doubting the possibility altogether.
Meanwhile, a Russian first deputy prime minister said Sunday that Russia proposed to create a global missile defence system by 2020.
"We are proposing to create a single missile defence system for all participants with equal access to the system's control," Sergei Ivanov said in a televised interview with the Vesti Nedeli programme on the Rossiya television channel.
Ivanov said the proposal applied both to the United States and European countries, including neutral states like Austria, Finland and Sweden.