Russian President Dmitry Medvedev Nov. 5, the day after Barack Obama [2]'s election as US president, made his first state-of-the-nation address since he took office in May—and pledged to deploy a short-range missile system in Russia's Baltic Sea enclave of Kaliningrad in response to US missile defense plans. He specifically invoked the Georgia [3] conflict in his comments. "The conflict in the Caucasus was used as a pretext to send NATO warships to the Black Sea and then to quickly thrust on Europe the need for deploying the US anti-missile system," he said. (CIIC [4], Nov. 5)
The weapon that Medvedev has promised to deploy in Russia's Baltic enclave is the Iskander-M, a surface-to-surface tactical ballistic missile, which NATO calls the SS-26. It has a range of up to 310 miles, capable of hitting targets in all of Poland [5] and parts of the Czech Republic [6] and Germany from Kaliningrad. The US "missile shield [5]" would employ a battery in Poland and a radar station in the Czech Republic. Moscow test-fired a new cruise missile version of the Iskander last year, at the same time as it tested an intercontinental ballistic missile, the RS-24. (The Guardian [7], Nov. 7)
See our last posts on Russia [3], Central Europe [8] and nuclear fear [9].
