Russian Foreign Policy toward Missile Defense by Lilly Bilyana;

Author:Lilly, Bilyana;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 2012-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Strategy of BMD Cooperation and BMD Containment

At the same time, albeit less vigorously, Russia continued to express willingness to cooperate on an alternative BMD project that would replace the U.S. European BMD architecture. In October 2006 the chief of the General Staff, Army General Yury Baluyevsky, stated that the Kremlin would support a NATO BMD system only if it were developed jointly with Moscow.[46] The head of the Russian Air Force, Colonel General Vladimir Mikhaylov, further elaborated that “equal participation should be the basic principle” in developing a joint BMD with Russia, closely involved in every step of the BMD formation and operation.[47] European governments, including France and Germany, continued to express willingness to cooperate with Russia on missile defense. Divergence in positions related to threat assessments, costs and the exact type of engagement, however, prevented the translation of these formally expressed intentions into actual policies.[48]

In the midst of Russia’s escalating confrontational strategy, in the summer of 2007, the Kremlin extended a proposal for an alternative missile defense structure. This was a logical step within Russia’s overall strategy of stalling the unilateral development of a U.S. missile defense. At the G8 summit in Germany in June 2007, Putin surprised the United States with his offer to provide access to intelligence on the Iranian missile program, collected from the Russian-leased Gabala radar station in Azerbaijan.[49] Putin’s proposals were not meant to be complementary to the planned European missile defense system. Similar to previous Russian offers, they were suggested as an alternative to U.S. BMD.[50] In return for information from the Gabala radar station, Moscow demanded that the United States pledged to remove its BMD components from Poland and the Czech Republic.[51] The Russian government attempted to gain public support for the Gabala proposal by inviting Western journalists to visit the Gabala radar base. Although the journalists were strictly supervised during their visit, the event constituted an unprecedented gesture of openness on the side of the Kremlin.[52]

Putin expanded his Gabala proposal at the Kennebunkport summit in July 2007. The Russian president offered the use of the Russian BMD radar station in Krasnodar in southwest Russia, approximately 434 miles (700 kilometers) from Iran. Putin also called for the revival of the Joint Data Exchange Center in Moscow (which was still not operational) and the construction of a similar early warning data center in Brussels.[53]

Putin’s proposal was not accepted for several reasons. President Bush welcomed Russia’s readiness to cooperate but was unwilling to change his administration’s plans for the deployment of BMD components in Poland and the Czech Republic. Furthermore, although the Russian radars could collect data on potential missile launches from Iran, they did not have the capabilities of the U.S. radar site, projected for deployment in the Czech Republic.[54] The military analyst Pavel Felgenhauer explained that the Gabala radar was an early warning radar, which was not capable of guiding missile interceptors to their targets. The range of the Gabala radar also did not cover all of Iran’s territory. Felgenhauer stipulated that

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