Russia on Tuesday presented NATO chief George Robertson with a plan for European missile defense to rival Washington's proposed nuclear shield and compel allies to choose sides in the row.
Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev handed the plan to Robertson and President Vladimir Putin later asked the secretary-general to put forward the proposals for discussion among its 16 member-states.
"We expect that in the near future your experts will study our proposals and after that our military and civilian experts are ready to arrive in Brussels to give the necessary explanations," Putin told Robertson.
"This work can be done on the widest possible basis," he added.
Putin warned the NATO chief that Russia was deeply concerned by Washington's anti-missile scheme and by the military bloc's expansion further eastwards into the former Soviet sphere of influence.
"Two problems are of concern to us: anti-missile defense and the problem of the alliance's expansion," he said.
Robertson struck a diplomatic tone, telling Putin that "our priority must be to build a crisis-resistant relationship based on trust and openness."
His visit comes at a time of increasing tension between Moscow and Washington over US plans to set up a national missile defense system (NMD), designed to protect the United States from attack by tracking missiles and shoot them down before they hit US soil.
President George W. Bush's administration is determined to push on with the 60-billion-dollar shield, saying it is needed to protect Washington from hostile states such as Iran and North Korea.
But Russia sees it as a threat to global security and argues that it would gut the cornerstone 1972 US-Soviet anti-ballistic missile treaty.
The scheme has also aroused doubts among some of Washington's European allies, notably France and Germany.
Russia's proposal for European missile defense involves several stages, starting with a meeting of experts to determine whether or not European states were threatened with non-strategic strikes, according to Leonid Ivashov, head of international relations at the defense ministry.
If a threat of this kind was detected, a second stage would involve talks to eliminate the threat by political or other peaceful means, followed if necessary by a third stage, the creation of an anti-missile defense system.
The system would comprise mobile elements "placed at the points most threatened by missile attack so as to protect the most important sites," Russian news agencies quoted Ivashov as saying.
But Russian military analysts said that the United States did not consider Moscow's technology advanced enough and America's European allies would not side with Russia on the issue.
Russian anti-missile defenses "do not guarantee the destruction of a missile and that's the main difficulty with our plan," said Pavel Felgenhauer, an independent Moscow-based defense expert.
"That is why the Americans have said they are not interested in cooperation with Russia," he added.
Konstantin Makienko of the Center for Analysis on Strategies and Technologies added: "Russia may want to drive a wedge between the United States and Europe but everybody understands that Washington is going to develop its own system."
On Monday a US lawmaker heading a delegation to Russia was quoted as saying he was bringing proposals from Bush on cooperating in the field of anti-missile defense.
But Republican Congressman Curt Weldon gave no details apart from saying that he had a letter for Putin that he believed contained a proposal for joint research into an anti-missile defense system.
Robertson's visit, which includes a ceremony reopening NATO’s Moscow information bureau closed after the 1999 Kosovo war, was billed as an opportunity for reconciliation after the year-long hiatus over the conflict.
But the US anti-missile plans and Russia's unease at the alliance's further expansion eastwards to encompass the Baltic countries have cast a cloud over the two-day visit that began late Monday – MOSCOW (AFP)
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