It would be interesting to know if the military’s top brass are
drinking champagne as they sit in their offices on Smolenskaya
Ploshchad and Arbat, or if they are cursing those cunning Americans for
outmaneuvering Moscow. U.S. President Barack Obama announced late last
week that he had made the difficult decision to cancel long-standing
U.S. plans to deploy elements of a global missile defense system in
Poland and the Czech Republic. The prospect of Washington creating a
so-called “third position region” (after California and Alaska) close
to Russia’s borders had been a main stumbling block in U.S.-Russian
relations for the past several years.
President Dmitry Medvedev will address the UN General Assembly on reforms to international relations, discuss how to end the crisis with leaders of the world’s leading 20 economies, and sit down with heads of state during a visit to the United States this week.
But Medvedev should remember that his country is nowhere near to being the superpower of Soviet days and lags far behind other countries in terms of importance on global financial markets, analysts said Monday.
On a related matter, a Kremlin spokesman said Monday that the president had to cancel a planned meeting with U.S. dissidents because of time constraints.
“Sadly, it was simply impossible to set up such an event within the president’s tight schedule here,” Kremlin spokesman Alexei Pavlov told The Moscow Times by telephone from New York.
Medvedev caused a minor stir last week when he told Western experts on Russia in the Valdai Club that he wanted to speak to dissident ... Read more »
