‘Certainly it’s a threat’: Moscow rejects NATO claims ABM site safe for Russia
RT.com
12 May, 2016
The newly inaugurated anti-missile site in Romania certainly poses a threat to Russia’s national security, the Kremlin said in response to NATO claims to the contrary.
“We have been saying right from when this story started that our experts are convinced that the deployment of the ABM system poses a certain threat to the Russian Federation,” presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Thursday.
“Measures are being taken to ensure the necessary level of security for Russia. The president himself (Vladimir Putin), let me remind you, has repeatedly asked who the system will work against?”, Peskov said.
The response comes after NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg reiterated the site is not a threat to Russia.
“This system is directed against threats coming from outside the Euro Atlantic space,” he said at a ribbon-cutting ceremony at the remote Deveselu airbase in southern Romania.
Romanian President Klaus Iohannis said the system was “purely defensive, not directed against any nations and cannot be used in an offensive operation.”
On Friday, the US will start construction work on an ABM site in Poland due to be ready by late 2018.
The US and NATO have been arguing for decades that the plans to deploy an anti-missile shield in Europe would not compromise Russian security. The AEGIS Ashore system deployed in Romania is a less ambitious incarnation of the ABM system, which replaced the initial project envisioned by the Bush administration. The shield is designed to protect Europe from a possible missile attack by Iran, the alliance says.
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