delusionofgrandeur

Russia has stated they will react with ‘military means’ if the proposed US-Czech anti ballistic missile system is deployed in the Czech Republic.

The USA made an initial agreement with the Czech Republic today over siting of the system which Russia believes will undermine their own balistic missile capabilities. The official US line is that the ABM system is designed solely for interception of launches from ‘rogue states’ (probably Middle Eastern states or perhaps specifically Iran).

A Russian foreign ministry statement said:

“we will be forced to react not with diplomatic, but with military-technical methods,”

Russia isn’t specifying but I’m hoping when they say they will respond with ‘military-technical methods’ they are implying they would use ‘Electronic Attack’ or radar jamming rather than rolling the Russian military machine into Prague. It seems clear that the Russian line is they will not be interested in any more diplomacy on the matter once an ABM system is deployed.

I don’t think it’s the greatest idea to antagonise Russia as they’re just about as strategically paranoid as everyone else who played a part in the cold war and are now left wondering exactly where they stand. Russia already offered to allow stationing of an ABM system on their own soil and this was turned down which undoubtedly worried them even more.

It’s certainly true that the system proposed for the Czech Republic would be far too small to block a Russian strategic launch in any meaningful way but Russia may be seeing this as the ‘thin end of the wedge’ in terms of US and future NATO plans for ABM systems.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 8th, 2008 at 6:22 pm and is filed under News, Politics.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.