Obama refused missile shield deal with Russia

US President Barack Obama refused to sign a missile shield deal with Russia, a decision that could wreck an upcoming summit and spark a new arms race between the two countries, Russia's authoritative Kommersant newspaper reported on Tuesday. The article quoted a senior Russian Foreign Ministry official, who said the US leader backed off from an agreement with Moscow stipulating the two countries would not deploy anti-missile systems against each other.
US officials gave their initial approval to the joint memorandum, but Obama refused to sign it as planned during a G8 summit in France in May, the newspaper reported. Leaders in the United States of the Pentagon and CIA opposed the memorandum, the report said. The Kommersant report came a day after Nato commander Admiral James G Stavridis met with Nikolai Markov, chief of Russia's army general staff, to discuss a conflict over a missile shield network planned by the Atlantic Alliance.
The Foreign Ministry official told Kommersant that if Russia and the United States fail by the end of 2011 to sign an agreement on missile defence, then Russia might not, as planned, attend a Nato summit in Chicago in May 2012. The official also predicted that an upcoming November meeting in Hawaii between Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev "will give no results on missile defence." The newspaper said it had obtained a copy of the failed agreement, which - according to Kommersant - would have obliged the US to give "a guarantee that missile defence systems in Europe will not have a negative effect on the ability of (Russian) strategic forces to perform deterrence."