Putin set the tone early on when he hosted the pair and their Russian counterparts at his country home outside Moscow and delivered a stern rebuff to U.S. plans to push ahead with establishing missile defense facilities in Poland and the Czech Republic.The wounded troops were transported to a military medical facility for "emergency treatment and further evaluation," the military said, adding the incident is under investigation."Events have triggered more detailed planning for the curtailment or closure" of access to Turkey, one official said. The key issue is to find ways to ship supplies and other critical equipment into Iraq.In combative comments that took the U.S. side aback during a photo session, Putin criticized Bush's pet project and threatened to pull out of a Cold War-era treaty that limits intermediate-range missiles."I agree that we did not agree on anything today," one official told reporters. He added quickly that neither Washington nor Moscow had expected sign!
ificant breakthroughs."We see two serious problems with these proposals," Lavrov told reporters at the news conference with Rice, Gates and Serdyukov. He said the two sides still disagree about the threat to Europe and complained that the negotiations with the Poles and Czechs were continuing.Turkey -- now a NATO member and a key U.S. ally in the war on terror -- accepts Armenians were killed but calls it a massacre during a chaotic time, not an organized campaign of genocide.Despite U.S. pledges of cooperation and new ideas on missile defense, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates were warned by President Vladimir Putin to back off on missile defense plans for the former Soviet sphere.Rice and Lavrov announced at a news conference after the meetings that the two sides would meet again in Washington in six months to review a "strategic framework" on evaluating and addressing the missile threat posed by countries the United States regards as !
rogue states, principally Iran.Serdyukov agreed.A spokesman for Putin,
Dmitry Peskov, told reporters in a conference call that "some of them are quite interesting and the Russian side will start examining this proposal."The U.S. proposals are intended to ease fears that its missile defense plans threaten Russia's nuclear deterrent and include the creation of a so-called joint regional missile defense architecture to protect the United States, NATO allies in Europe and Russia."The principal thing to which we did not agree today is the deployment of anti-missile elements which have an anti-Russian character and which are to be placed in Europe," he said.In a series of meetings Friday, Rice and Gates failed to turn around Moscow's opposition to the system and other strategic arms issues and got little more than a pledge to meet again.As part of that plan, experts from all nations covered by the system would be based at missile defense facilities to try to improve coordination and transparency.The attack comes a day after a security official in Ir!
aq's Salaheddin province said that a U.S. military operation Thursday night killed 20 civilians, most of them women and children. Full story
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