President Dmitry Medvedev warned Wednesday Russia could pull out a new nuclear disarmament treaty and enter a new Cold War with the West if the two sides failed to agree on a new missile defence shield.This seems to be a fairly common ritual, as you can see from this 2008 report,
And you can find press stories every year since, all with either Putin or Medvedev threatening a new "Cold War."Russia put the West on alert for a new Cold War that the Kremlin is ready to fight, its President said yesterday.President Medvedev set tensions soaring when he recognised the independence of two breakaway republics inside Georgia. “We are not afraid of anything, including the prospect of a Cold War,” he said. Hours earlier he had ordered his Foreign Ministry to start establishing diplomatic ties with the secessionist regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
Sigh . . . do we really have to say it? Ok, here goes, "Hey, buddy, how'd that last Cold War go for you? You went from a country of 23 million sq. km. to one of about 17 million, and from a population of about 291 million to 142 million. Keep it up, and soon Luxembourg will be bigger."
May I suggest that, rather than reading Western coverage, you check what he actually said. (http://eng.kremlin.ru/news/2223)
ReplyDelete"We would like the European anti-missile defence to develop according to clear rules. It must be clear to everyone that anti-missile defence is a way to form blocs or reduce strategic opportunities for many nations. When they tell us, “This is not aimed against you,” I take note of it, but I understand that other nations that are referred to in this case do not currently have the opportunities that Russia has, and it is unlikely that they will have them in the upcoming years.
They usually tell us, “It’s Iran, or someone else.” They don’t have those possibilities. So that means it’s against us? And if it’s against us, then they should invite us to cooperate or tell us about it openly. I hope that I will get answers to the questions I have posed, in particular to my colleague and friend President Obama, and we will be able to develop a model for cooperation in anti-missile defence.
If we do not develop one, then we will have to take counter measures, something I really do not want to do, and then we will start talking about forcing the development of our nuclear strike potential. This would be a very bad scenario; it would be the kind of scenario that would throw us back into the Cold War era. And I told President Obama: “In 2020, when we will have passed through all four phases of preparing the so-called adapted four-step approach, it is quite likely that these decisions will no longer be made by you or me. But somebody will be making them.”
This is not a threat, it is a conditional warning: if we feel you are threatening us, then we will have to respond.
It's what anyone else would say.