Czech Republic

Russian envoy to NATO, Dmitry Rogozin, said Friday that the latest U.S. proposals on its planned missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic contain strange elements. He said Russian experts are scrutinizing Washington's proposals brought to Moscow by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates earlier this month.

President George W. Bush and the leader of the Czech Republic said Wednesday that they were close to agreeing on a plan for the United States to install an early-warning radar system in the Czech Republic, a key component of a missile defense system that has drawn stiff opposition from Russia.

NATO is looking into how a planned US missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic could relate to the alliance, on both technical and political levels, its secretary general said Friday.

Soviet era foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze on Wednesday warned world leaders not to let the row over US plans to place a missile shield in Europe escalate into another Cold War. "We must not repeat the mistakes of the past, we must not allow another Cold War to happen," Shevardnadze said as he presented the German version of his political memoirs, "Thoughts on the Past and the Future", at the Frankfurt Book Fair. "It is my moral duty to make this warning. We must not allow the upset about missiles and anti-missile systems to escalate.

MOSCOW, October 11 (RIA Novosti) - The missile defense elements the U.S. plans to deploy in Poland could be used as shock weapons, and present a real threat to Russia, a Russian military expert said on Thursday. "The antimissile missiles the U.S. plans to deploy in Poland are capable of flying along a ballistic trajectory, and can be considered a shock weapon. They can easily be equipped with special warheads and are fairly precise," Professor Vladimir Zavaly, a missile defense expert, told RIA Novosti.