Moscow reaches out to Obama on missiles

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By Martin Sieff UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL

Russian leaders are offering an olive branch to the incoming Obama administration in hopes that it will scrap a planned missile-defense system based in Poland and the Czech Republic.

Russian President Dimitry Medvedev told French journalists that he had spoken by phone with President-elect Barack Obama and that they hoped to meet as soon as possible.

"I hope ... we'll be able to find a way out of these [difficult] situations, which we haven't been able to do with our current colleagues," Mr. Medvedev said in the interview, which was broadcast Thursday.

Within hours of Mr. Obama's election last week, the Russian president threatened to base short-range missiles in Kaliningrad, a Russian enclave on the Baltic Sea sandwiched between Poland and Lithuania.

An Obama transition official confirmed that the two spoke Saturday morning.

"They both expressed a desire to meet early in the new administration and the president-elect underscored the need to collaborate on the financial crisis, nuclear proliferation, including in Iran and North Korea, and in fighting terrorism," the official said.

"The issue of missile defense did not come up in the phone call," the official said, talking on the condition of anonymity because she was not authorized to speak for attribution.

Mr. Medvedev suggested in Thursday's interview that Russia would change course if the U.S. abandoned plans for a European missile defense.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said he was perplexed by the Russian threat.

"Quite frankly, I'm not clear what the missiles would be for in Kaliningrad. After all, the only real emerging threat on Russia's periphery is in Iran and I don't think the Iskander [Russian] missile has the range to get there from Kaliningrad," Mr. Gates said Thursday in the Estonian capital, Tallinn.