Putin Questions NATO Enlargement 1 hour, 52 minutes ago
Russian President Vladimir Putin said NATO enlargement has not necessarily improved world security, and warned in a television interview broadcast Saturday that bringing Ukraine into the alliance could pose problems. Ukrainian officials say they want their country to join NATO eventually, but Putin said Russia would not keep sensitive weapons in Ukraine if the alliance had a military presence there. Russia's current cooperation with its southern neighbor is "enormous," Putin said in the interview with France-3 recorded Friday. But "if there were a NATO military presence in Ukraine, I wouldn't maintain our latest technologies and our sensitive armaments." "Ukraine could have problems," Putin said through a translator. Russia's relations with former Soviet states became a subject of discontent with the United States after President Bush decided to bracket his visit to Moscow for Monday's World War II commemoration with trips to Latvia and Georgia, which is in the Caucasus. Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko last month set joining NATO and the European Union as a key goal, and Putin was likely reacting to the new push that would move Ukraine further from Moscow's influence. In the interview, he said NATO's decision to admit the Baltic states to the alliance last year did not enhance security in the world. "The fact that NATO exercises a great influence on the Ukraine or Georgia does not indispose us," Putin was quoted as saying by the translator. "On the other hand, all enlargement of NATO does not (necessarily) improve security in the world." "I don't see in what way enlarging to our Baltic neighbors, for instance, can improve the security of the world." Latvian President Vaira Vike-Freiberga is the only Baltic leader to accept an invitation to attend the commemoration in Moscow. The leaders of Estonia and Lithuania said they could not go because Russia has refused to acknowledge five decades of Soviet domination of the Baltics following WWII. Putin reiterated that Russia will not answer the demands of Baltic states to repent for years of Soviet domination. "I would like to underscore in this regard that such pretensions are useless," Putin wrote in the daily Le Figaro. He suggested that in 1989 the Supreme Soviet had already made amends, giving a "judicial and moral appreciation" of the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with Nazi Germany that led to the Soviet role in the Baltics. Russia insists the three Baltic states willingly joined the Soviet Union on the basis of the pact. Putin said Friday that the 1989 resolution criticized the pact as "a personal decision by (Soviet leader Josef) Stalin that contradicted the interests of the Soviet people." Putin suggested the Baltic states are using their complaints "to justify a discriminatory, reprehensible policy of governments toward a considerable part of their own Russian-speaking population," referring to claims that Russian speakers face discrimination today in the Baltics. http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/europe/*http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl =story&u=/ap/20050507/ap_on_re_eu/france_putin Serbian News Network - SNN [email protected] http://www.antic.org/
