(Agencies)
Updated: 2007-10-27 19:15

MAFRA - Russian President Vladimir Putin drew a parallel on Friday between US plans for a missile shield in Europe and the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, widely regarded as the closest the world came to nuclear war.

Russia's President Vladimir Putin talks to journalists during the press conference of the EU-Russia summit in Mafra monastery on the outskirts of Lisbon October 26, 2007. [Agencies]

But the Kremlin leader said his personal friendship with US President George W. Bush had helped to prevent the latest US initiative from turning into a new global disaster.

"I would remind you how relations were developing in an analogous situation in the middle of the 1960s," he told a news conference after the Russia-EU summit in the Portugal.

"Analogous actions by the Soviet Union when it deployed rockets on Cuba provoked the Cuban missile crisis," said Putin. "For us, technologically, the situation is very similar. On our borders such threats to our country are being created."

Russia has been outraged by the US decision to deploy a radar in the Czech Republic and interceptor missiles in Poland to avert potential missile strikes from countries like Iran. It sees the plan as an outright threat to its security.

In Washington, US State Department spokesman Sean McCormack strongly rejected Putin's comparison between the US missile shield proposal and the Cuban crisis.

"There are some very clear historical differences between our plans to deploy a defensive missile system designed to protect against launch of missiles from rogue states such as Iran, and the offensive nuclear capability of the missiles that were being installed in Cuba back in the 1960s," McCormack said.

"They are not historically analogous in any way, shape or form," he said.

US Defense Secretary Robert Gates said: "I don't know quite what to make of the strong remarks. Even within his comments ... (Putin) still acknowledged that we had made some positive proposals and put forward some interesting ideas."

Russian Concerns

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