ST.PETERSBURG. Nov 24 (Interfax-AVN) - If the U.S. plan to deploy elements of its missile shield in Europe is carried through, Russia will respond adequately, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said.
"This project is targeted against Russia's strategic potential. We can't fail giving it an adequate response," Putin told an international conference on humanitarian law in St.Petersburg on Monday.
No one knows who will benefit from such moves, he said. "But it's clear that Europe will be the first to lose," he added.
Putin reiterated the Russian leadership's pledge that "if the new U.S. administration refrains from deploying sites of the missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic, the question of Russia's response measures will be dropped." In that case, "we'll be able to halt the dangerous negative trend on the European continent," Putin said.
Putin also spoke about what he called the dangerous tendency of "erosion" of the agreements regulating international security affairs.
This has to do, in the first place, with the U.S. administration's unilateral decision to withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM), which, he said, "was the cornerstone of global strategic stability."
This treaty was the backbone "to which all other agreements on strategic stability were pegged," the prime minister said.
The actual meaning of that decision made itself felt in the context of the plan to deploy a third missile launch site in Europe, he also said.
"Whichever 'arguments' our American colleagues choose to cite, it is absolutely clear to us that this project is targeted against Russia's strategic potential," Putin said.