NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer
Photo: AP
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NATO-Russian Dialog Resumes Slowly
NATO General Secretary Jaap de Hoop Scheffer reported Tuesday after a meeting of NATO foreign ministers that a gradually resumption of dialog with Russia has been agreed to. “Allies agreed on what I would qualify as a conditional and graduated reengagement with Russia,” Scheffer said. He added that the Russia-NATO Council will begin meeting again informally.
The Russia-NATO Council was the main forum for a dialog between Russia and the North Atlantic alliance. That dialog was frozen after the war in South Ossetia in August. Russia stopped military cooperation with NATO after it criticized Russia for a “disproportionate” response in the war. One of the main topics of negotiations will be Georgia and Ukraine, which are lobbying for admission to the alliance. NATO leadership has said that they will be admitted, but no deadline has been set for that and they do not have membership action plans.
The NATO meeting was widely discussed in advance by Russian politicians. Chairman of the Federation Council Foreign Affairs Committee Mikhail Margelov correctly predicted that Ukraine and Georgia would not be offered membership at this time. “[Former U.S. secretary of state] Madeleine Albright recently said in a conversation with [Russian] President Dmitry Medvedev that NATO is now ‘a different organization,’ from the one of the Cold War years,” Margelov noted. Chairman of the State Duma Foreign Affairs Committee Konstantin Kosachev had the same expectation. He noted that NATO had enough problems – in Afghanistan, Congo, Darfur and Iraq, for example – without adding Ukraine and Georgia to the list. He thought the two former Soviet republics would not become NATO members “in the foreseeable future.”
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