MOSCOW, October 14 (RIA Novosti) - Recent developments in U.S. missile shield plans are positive, but Moscow still has a number of questions on the issue, a Russian deputy foreign minister said on Wednesday.
Sergei Ryabkov said Russia was "particularly interested" in "what we should expect, where these systems will be based, how it [the missile shield] will be made up."
On Tuesday, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov met in Moscow, with U.S. missile defense plans central to their discussions.
"The Americans provided detailed explanations on these issues, and we will study them," Ryabkov said, adding, however, that the way U.S. plans flesh out "will depend on the situation."
He said a date for the next round of consultations was yet to be agreed but that in the meantime "we will mainly work to prepare for a joint assessment of missile proliferation risks."
Ryabkov also said the United States had shown interest in security cooperation with Russia along a number of lines, not only on joint use of the Gabala radar facility in Azerbaijan.
Moscow offered the use of the radar station as an alternative to now-dropped U.S. plans for a missile shield in Central Europe, but Washington previously said it could be used as a "supplement," if at all.
The chief of the U.S. missile defense agency said the radar site in Azerbaijan is too close to Iran to serve as an adequate replacement for the proposed facility in the Czech Republic.
Clinton said on Tuesday that the United States had shown Russia its reassessment of the Iranian missile threat and was expecting cooperation with Moscow on the issue of missile defense.
She said that Russian-U.S. missile defense cooperation would benefit not only the two former Cold War foes, but the whole world.
"We want to ensure that we answer every question asked by the Russian military or government...because we want to be as transparent as possible," she said.
U.S. President Barack Obama in September dropped plans to deploy a radar in the Czech Republic and interceptor missiles in Poland, due to a reassessment of the threat from Iran. Moscow had fiercely opposed the plans as a threat to its national security.
