(Agencies)
Updated: 2007-09-22 10:32

MOSCOW - Russia's foreign minister has suggested that the true reason the United States wants an anti-missile system in Eastern Europe is not to defend Europe but to spy on Russia.

Sergey Lavrov made the comments in an interview broadcast Friday on state-run television, just days after American technical experts visited the Russian-leased Gabala radar in the ex-Soviet state of Azerbaijan, which borders Iran to the north.

Russia has responded angrily to US proposals to base elements of a missile defense system in the Czech Republic and Poland. Moscow's counterproposal is for Russia and the United States to use the Gabala radar. US officials have said the radar's technology is outdated and emphasized that even if they were to use the Russian radar, it would not replace the US elements.

"When our American partners say that Gabala cannot be an alternative to a radar in the Czech Republic, I understand them, because the Gabala radar cannot see Russian territory from its western borders to the Urals ... a radar in the Czech Republic can," Lavrov said.

"Any action calls for a counteraction. This doesn't even have any sort of ill thought; this is the law of the genre. This is the obligation of militaries, the obligation for the commander in chief to guarantee the maximally effective answer to any threat," he said.

Lavrov repeated Russian arguments that building the missile defense system will likely spark a new arms race.

"We see a threat and we are preparing a response to it," he said. "And this for sure will stimulate the scientists on that side of the ocean, the military-industrial complex, to build some sort of more effective type of weapons. But our guys also won't be sitting on their hands."

The issue has grown into one of the serious disputes ruffling ties between Moscow and Washington.

Brig. Gen. Patrick O'Reilly, deputy director of the US Missile Defense Agency, said this week after visiting the Gabala station that it was too old for the purpose of defending against a potential threat from Iran - Washington's main argument for building the European system.

"Our impression here was that it is a radar that has performed the function it was designed to by the Russians back in the '80s and has been performing since and we are evaluating how that would fit in with a mutually beneficial cooperative way ahead," O'Reilly told reporters on Tuesday.

The Gabala facility was built specifically to track US bombers and submarine-launched missiles from the Indian Ocean to the south.

According to Russian security analyst Pavel Podvig, the radar has poor resolution data and will be near the end of its useful life within the next four years. It also reportedly is unable to process tracking data independently and must transmit them to facilities outside of Moscow.