Russian President Medvedev was silent on the subject.
As to the ultimate purpose of the U.S. training Georgia's armed forces for deployment to Afghanistan, in September Saakashvili told cadets at a military base in Georgia that "someone may say: 'we have so many problems, our territories are occupied and there is no time now for going somewhere else to fight.' But because of these very same problems that we have, we need huge combat experience...and that [Afghan mission] is a unique combat and war school." [6]
As noted earlier, Obama set aside time on the first day of last week's NATO summit in Portugal to meet privately with his fellow Columbia University alumnus Saakashvili.
Between Clinton's meeting with Georgia's prime minister and Obama's with its president, State Department spokesman Philip Crowley sided with military ally Japan on what Washington also considers to be "occupied territory," Russia's Kuril Islands. On November 2 he affirmed "We do back Japan regarding the Northern Territories," the Japanese term for the islands.
Russia's Medvedev has made an odd choice of partners. Washington has consistently supported Japan, with which it is bound by the 1960 Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan, and Georgia, which it is committed to under the terms of the 2009 United States-Georgia Charter on Strategic Partnership, against Russia in regards to territorial disputes and openly accuses Russia of occupying territory belonging to two of its major military allies.
There is no reciprocity in Russian-American relations.
Even in the transition from the former Bush administration's interceptor missile plans for Eastern Europe, the new Phased Adaptive Approach of current administration - described by Obama himself in September of 2009 as providing "stronger, smarter and swifter defenses of American forces and America's allies" than his predecessor's would have - will, as formalized by last week's NATO summit declaration, be far broader than 10 ground-based midcourse missiles in Poland.
That NATO chief Rasmussen has repeatedly advocated - and since the Lisbon summit has secured - a U.S.-controlled interceptor missile system over all of Europe as the continent is allegedly threatened because "30 countries have or are aspiring to get missile technology" without ever listing which nations he's speaking of or being pressed to do so by the news media is reprehensible. Four days before the summit began he told journalists in Brussels: "There is no reason to name specific countries, because there are already a lot of them." That the Russian government allows such statements to go unchallenged is criminal.
This May the Pentagon moved the first interceptor missiles into Europe by installing a Patriot Advanced Capability-3 battery in Poland as close to Russia's border - 35 miles - as possible. [7]
The day before the NATO summit in Lisbon, Polish Defense Minister Bogdan Klich revealed that the U.S. will start rotating F-16 Fighting Falcon jet fighters and Hercules military transport planes to Poland in 2013. The U.S. provided Poland with 48 F-16s between 2006 and 2008, the first deployment of the planes to a former member of the Warsaw Pact and the largest arms purchase in Poland's history. (Russia's Black Sea neighbors Romania and Bulgaria were next in line to purchase F-16 warplanes until the current financial crisis hit Europe.)
On November 16 the U.S. delivered the third of five C-130 Hercules military transport aircraft to Poland. "The C-130 aircraft are Poland's biggest transport planes. Polish crews used the planes to fly to Spain, Georgia, Iraq and Afghanistan." [8]
U.S. F-15C Eagle aerial combat fighters are operating out of the Siauliai Air Base in Lithuania until the end of the year for the now six-year-old NATO Baltic Air Policing mission, and earlier this month they participated in a Baltic Region Training Event with NATO Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) aircraft at the Siauliai Air Base.
Fellow Baltic state Estonia recently opened the newly expanded and modernized Amari Air Base for use by NATO and U.S. warplanes. [9]
The U.S. has gained access to and has been employing eight military bases, including three air bases, in Bulgaria and Romania over the past five years.
This February Romania and Bulgaria were prevailed upon by the U.S. to provide missile shield installations for the Pentagon's - and now NATO's - interceptor missile system, in the case of Romania a land-based adaptation of the Standard Missile-3 (SM-3) as the 1936 Montreux Convention prohibits the transit of non-Black Sea nations' warships over 45,000 tons through the Bosporus Straits and the Dardanelles into the sea and as such effectively excludes U.S. Aegis class destroyers and cruisers equipped with SM-3s. There are no comparable restrictions in the Baltic Sea region where the Pentagon is also going to station land-based SM-3s in Poland.
The U.S. and its NATO allies in Europe have yet to ratify the 1999 Adapted Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty - insisting, without legal foundation, on linkage with the demand for the withdrawal of Russian peacekeeping contingents in Transdniester, Abkhazia and South Ossetia - and the U.S. and NATO are in direct violation of it through establishing a permanent (in all but name) military presence in several Eastern European countries. [11]
The Pentagon and NATO resumed annual Sea Breeze exercises in Ukraine this July, presided over by commander of U.S. Naval Forces in Europe and Africa Admiral Mark Fitzgerald, after last year's exercise was cancelled because of domestic opposition, particularly in the Crimea where the exercises are held near the Russian Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol.
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