Russia’s missile pullback

Russian officials may be walking back a bit on earlier hints that they were suspending the deployment of missiles to the Kaliningrad region in response to Barack Obama’s more conciliatory tone. Voice of America is reporting that senior Russian military officials have called the reports “premature”:

They said Russia has not taken any practical steps to deploy the short-range Iskander missiles and therefore one can not speak of a suspension.

The earlier reports stated the Russia had made its decision after a phone call between Dmitry Medvedev and Barack Obama in which the U.S. president promised to reexamine the U.S. missile shield program on its merits.

Previous statements indicate that Obama isn’t a big fan of missile defense, but it would be hard for him to scrap the program entirely without looking weak and angering the Czech Republic and Poland, who have signed treaties to host the system.

The two leaders will likely discuss the issue in person at the G20 summit in April, but an unspoken arrangement in which the U.S. is in no particulary hurry to set up the shield and Russia is no particular hurry to set up its missiles without any options being taken off the table, might be the best conceivable outcome.

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