#4 - RW 265
U.S.-Russia missile defense agreement possible - U.S. Ambassador

MOSCOW. July 16 (Interfax) - U.S. Ambassador to Russia Alexander Vershbow has suggested that Russia and the United States might sign an intergovernmental agreement on missile defense.

"I do think it is possible that we could develop a very different kind of agreement between our governments that would be a framework for collaboration in the area of missile defense," Vershbow said in an interview with Interfax.

The ambassador believes that "this could take the form of some kind of agreement on military-technical cooperation."

"That could be a way of facilitating cooperation between the American and Russian defense industries on specific missile defense projects," he said.

Vershbow recalled that during a meeting in St. Petersburg on June 1, Russian and U.S. Presidents Vladimir Putin and George W. Bush adopted a joint statement, in which they noted that "we had made some progress on identifying some of these areas of missile defense."

"There will be working-level meetings during this summer on this subject, and we hope there will be additional progress that the presidents can discuss when they meet at Camp David," the ambassador said.

At the same time, Vershbow said: "I do not think that a treaty of the type of 1972 is likely."

The United States unilaterally pulled out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM) on June 13, 2002 to be able to start building a national missile defense system.

The 1972 ABM Treaty allowed the parties to deploy strategic missile defense systems only in one area (around Moscow in Russia and the Grand Forks intercontinental ballistic missile base in the United States).

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