U.S. Bases Pose Threat to Russia — Chief of Post-Soviet Security Pact

Created: 12.11.2005 11:25 MSK (GMT +3), Updated: 12:19 MSK

MosNews
The Russian head of a military pact including several ex-Soviet nations said Friday that the U.S. and NATO bases around Russia were a potential threat to the country, but Moscow has no immediate plans to build up its military presence in Central Asia.

While not an immediate danger, those facilities near Russian borders were potentially destabilizing, said Nikolai Bordyuzha, secretary general of the six-nation Collective Security Treaty. The pact links Russia with Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, the Associated Press reported.

“Military bases around Russia may become a threat if attempts are made to exert political and military pressure on our state,” Bordyuzha said at a round-table discussion. However, he added, Moscow had no immediate intention to beef up its military presence in Central Asia.

Russia has expressed concern about NATO’s expansion eastward to embrace ex-Soviet allies and former Soviet Baltic nations, but it also has signed an agreement with NATO to expand cooperation on counterterrorism, nonproliferation and peacekeeping.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told a Romanian newspaper that Moscow expects NATO to honor its earlier pledge not to deploy significant military forces on the territories of new NATO members. Many Russian officials and lawmakers are also increasingly jittery about the U.S. military presence in the formerly Soviet Central Asia. U.S. forces are using a base in Kyrgyzstan to support military activity in nearby Afghanistan, and U.S. forces were recently evicted from another base in Uzbekistan.

“American bases are like a stone in our shoe,” Nikolai Leonov, an ex-KGB general now a member of the parliament’s security affairs committee, said during the roundtable.

President Vladimir Putin initially welcomed the U.S. deployment in Central Asia following the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, but Moscow later became impatient about the American presence as U.S.-Russian relations chilled. Russia later opened its own military base in Kyrgyzstan, just 20 miles away from the U.S. base. Russian troops have also deployed in neighboring Tajikistan.