Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko, center, and Defense Minister Anatoly Gritsenko, left, attend the Clear Sky exercises in the Nikolaev Region.
Photo: Nikolay Lazarenko
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Ukraine Sees No Threat in U.S. Interceptors in Europe
Ukrainian Defense Ministry sees no threat for the country resulted from deploying the U.S. missile defense sites in Czechia and Poland. “No matter whether we want it or not, the NATO states will be deploying their sites regardless if it could be inconvenient for anyone, even for their neighbors,” said Deputy Defense Minister Vladimir Tereshchenko.
Some time earlier, the Foreign Ministry of the country viewed the U.S. intention to deploy interceptors in Czechia and Poland as additional action of fighting terrorism.
But Russia apparently thinks different. The U.S. plans of creating missile defense sites in Europe will be a wrong step with negative aftereffects for global security, Russia’s Foreign Ministry’s spokesman Mikhail Kamynin expressed the official standing of the ministry January 26.
“Establishment of the European antimissile base of the United States couldn’t be viewed other than the material reconfiguration of the U.S. military presence in Europe,” Kamynin specified.
”No matter what arguments we are given about the so-called absence of direction of this base against Russia and about its designation for solving the problems of proliferation of mass destruction weapons and about the opposition to the missile threat from Asian directions, we cannot but see the sequential attachment of strategic component to the U.S. armed forces in the region,” Russia’s Foreign Ministry made clear.
Pentagon tested a new missile defense system in the Pacific Ocean on the next day after the statement of the Russia's foreign authority.
Launched by THAAD system deployed at one of the Hawaiian Islands, an interceptor hit the target ballistic missile of Scud type that was launched with no warhead from another island of the Hawaii. Of three tests that began in October 2006, it was the second successful performance.
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