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Russia cancels all military cooperation with NATO
Russia, apparently stung by NATO's condemnation of its military action in Georgia, plans to cease all military exercises with Norway and other NATO members.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has claimed NATO is pursuing anti-Russian policies and supporting an aggressive Georgia. He insists Russia is not occupying Georgia and has no plans to annex the separatist Georgian regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
PHOTO: AP
Espen Barth Eide, state secretary in Norway's Defense Ministry, was trying to determine the extent of the breakdown in Russian cooperation.
Russian authorities informed the Norwegian Foreign Ministry on Wednesday that officials in Moscow were immediately halting, cancelling or postponing all planned military cooperation with NATO's members.
Russia's relation to NATO would then be re-evaluated, reported Aftenposten.
The warning from Russia signals a further deterioration in relations between Russia and western nations. It comes a day after NATO members meeting at a summit in Brussels criticized Russia's military aggression in Georgian territory and voted to suspend cooperation with NATO’s Russian council.
"There’s no doubt that our relationship to Russian has now chilled," Espen Barth Eide, state secretary in the Defense Ministry, told Aftenposten.
Barth Eide was working Wednesday afternoon to determine the actual effects of the Russians' announcement to halt cooperation.
Around 10 joint military exercises were planned involving Russian and NATO members through the end of this year. They will probably all be cancelled.
Barth Eide said he was trying to discern other concrete examples of what the Russians' move will mean. He's unsure whether joint search and rescue efforts, border controls or fisheries inspections will, for example, be affected.
Norway shares a border with Russia in the far north, and cooperation between Norwegian and Russian agencies in the area had been increasing since the end of the Cold War.
Barth Eide repeated comments made late last week by Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Støre, saying that Norway has wanted to continue nurturing cooperation with Russia.
"But now the conflict between NATO and Russia has been further intensified," Barth Eide said. "This is a quite demanding political landscape that's under development."
A professor at the University of Oslo said earlier on Tuesday that there were signs the Cold War was starting up again, after Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said Wednesday that the war in Georgia emphasizes the need for closer military cooperation between Syria and Russia.
Syria was one of the Soviet Union's key allies during the Cold War. Professor Daniel Heradstveit called al-Assad's remarks "bad news for the West," adding that "this begins to taste like the Cold War."
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