Alwaght- Russia has said the newly inaugurated United States anti-missile site in Romania certainly poses a threat to its national security.
“We have been saying right from when this story started that our experts are convinced that the deployment of the ABM system poses a certain threat to the Russian Federation,” Russia's presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Thursday.
"Measures are being taken to ensure the necessary level of security for Russia. The president himself (Vladimir Putin), let me remind you, has repeatedly asked who the system will work against?", Peskov said.
The response comes after NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg claimed that the $800 million missile site is not a threat to Russia.
“This system is directed against threats coming from outside the Euro Atlantic space,” he said at a ribbon-cutting ceremony at the remote Deveselu airbase in southern Romania.
Romanian President Klaus Iohannis claimed the system was “purely defensive, not directed against any nations and cannot be used in an offensive operation.”
Russia remains unconvinced. While it doesn’t dispute that its strategic nuclear arsenal would not be compromised by the Romanian site if a global nuclear war were to happen, Moscow says it would be a significant factor in a smaller-scale conflict that doesn’t involve hundreds of missiles fired by each side.
On Friday, the US will start construction work on an ABM site in Poland due to be ready by late 2018.
Moreover, the system uses a vertical launching system to fire missile interceptors, which was derived from the naval version of AEGIS. The same launchers are used to fire Tomahawk cruise missiles from US guided-missile destroyers. Moscow says the Romanian site could easily and secretly be converted into a cruise missile base that can attack targets on Russian soil.
Russia is incensed at such of show of force by its Cold War rival in formerly communist-ruled Eastern Europe. Moscow says the US- military led alliance is trying to encircle it close to the strategically important Black Sea, home to a Russian naval fleet and where NATO is also considering increasing patrols.
"It is part of the military and political containment of Russia," Andrey Kelin, a senior Russian Foreign Ministry official, said on Thursday, the Interfax news agency reported.
"These decisions by NATO can only exacerbate an already difficult situation," he added, saying the move would hinder efforts to repair ties between Russia and the alliance.
