Tue Mar 23, 2004 09:48 AM ET
By Tom Miles
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia warned Tuesday that it would "respond" to NATO warplanes patrolling on its frontiers once the three ex-Soviet Baltic states join the U.S.-led defense bloc next week but it did not say what that response would be.
"If the alliance thinks the region needs such defenses, Russia has a right to draw its own conclusions and will be forced to respond accordingly," Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Yakovenko told a news conference in Moscow.
NATO sources have said four Danish fighters will patrol the alliance's newly extended frontiers in the skies over Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, which have very limited air forces of their own, once the three join NATO Monday, March 29.
"We are now studying this step," Yakovenko said, without elaborating what form the Russian reaction might take.
Moscow bitterly opposed the expansion of its old Cold War adversary into eastern Europe and especially into territories that were until 1991 integral parts of the Soviet Union. But faced with a fait accompli it has since sought cooperation with NATO and any confrontation has been limited to the verbal.
Yakovenko said the patrols would directly affect Russian security interests and show bad faith in the coordination which the two sides tried to foster at a summit in Rome in 2002.
A better way forward would be to speed up the launch of a modified treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE), he said, referring to a Cold War-era pact limiting armed forces.
NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer is expected in Moscow in the coming week to try to allay Russian suspicions about the plan for the Baltic states, which were left with no effective combat aircraft when they broke from Soviet control.
Russia is likely to tell him the plan is misguided.
"It's unfortunate that in taking this decision, the NATO countries didn't get a realistic picture of the military situation in the region, where there are no direct security threats, partly because of unprecedented disarmament efforts by Russia and other states," said Yakovenko.
He added that arguments that the patrols might help defend NATO members against terrorists were "barely credible."
The Baltic trio also joins the European Union on May 1. Estonia and Latvia border Russia's main landmass while Lithuania has a frontier with Moscow's Kaliningrad enclave.
Nothing has changed about Russia in the past 45 years other than the illusion that Russia is more of a democracy than it used to be. The democracy of Russia seems a bit on the touchy side lately testing it's launching capability and acting in a threatening manner about NATO planes. I guess the "citizens" there don't trust us much.
The word 'democracy' itself means 'rule by the people.' A democracy is a system where people can change their rulers in a peaceful manner and the government is given the right to rule because the people say it may."