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with Canada or the U.S., or the recently-held Baltic exercise. We invite also to such exercises and we go to such
exercises.
As well, when it's stipulated that the objectives and purposes of such an exercise is of some practical
interest to us we have a more practice interoperability drills for the combat readiness... Permanent combat
readiness of the defence ministry for the special units of the Defence Ministry, with counterpart units from the
NATO states.
But here we are, naturally enough, talking about serious no-nonsense matters about technical
maintenance, in terms of intelligence communications and decision making. And just to spite anyone, we are not
refusing to anyone on not doing anything like that.
Q: ...the Associated Press. Minister Ivanov, could you clarify for us the status of the document which
apparently came out of your Ministry last week which referred to NATO as an offensive organization with anti-
Russian components?
Ivanov: I don't know who has thrown out this canard, these newspaper quotes. Today I was reading that
actual report through my colleagues sent to the Defence Ministers sent to the NATO-Rrussia Council item by
item. I was asking there whether there were questions. They did not tell me they had. Nothing offensive and
nothing radically anti-NATO was found there by my colleagues.
Sure, we have some certain disagreements which are related in the first place to the attempts of
advancement of the purely military infrastructure of the block closer to our bodies to the extent that we're not
very much pleased with a situation where the aircraft of... … NATO state would be stationed together in a place
which is a three minutes flight away from St. Petersburg. Nobody would like that.
We also dislike some overflights by specific …… Awacs aircraft along our borders or the previously
practised flights of this kind and we also say that in an open manner. But all those things are being discussed and
debated upon in a normal proper way with a common understanding that their major tasks and objectives for the
armed forces development for NATO and Russia are actually similar. I was talking about that extensively today,
the challenges and threats to NATO and Russia are also absolutely identical and they spring out from pretty
much the same places and situations. This is a fait accompli, a factor itself, and we have not been in any
discussions with NATO on the...
Q: ...New York Times. Thanks for your time today. I wanted to ask about the continued American military
access to bases in the former Soviet republics of Central Asia. Those were negotiated before the war in
Afghanistan, of course. Now that major combat is over in Afghanistan, are you concerned that the American
military can still use those bases? Do you wish that access would end, or do you support limits on the America
military's access to those bases?
Thank you sir.
Ivanov: that is a good question. Really, we have to go back to the past for a while and to remember the
time has not been …… by NATO states, not for years, but the NATO states constituted a number of their base in
sizes in the first place for the aircraft in Uzbekistan and Manas, in Kyrgyzia, Russia. It was understood the
necessity behind such bases in places without which the toppling by military means of the Taliban would be
either very difficult or very... Quite impossible. And the Russian Federation supported those plans and voiced its
attitudes, by the way, not to the U.S. Government, but also to the states where those bases were being planned
upon to be set up.
This having been said, we have always been proceeding from the fact that those bases exist solely for the
period as requisite for the final definitive stabilization of the situation in Afghanistan. I would like to correct
what he said. Right now sorties flights by aircraft are still continued today. Yes, they end tomorrow, but so we
understand this pretty well, but we also trust for the pre-notified tasks of stabilization in Afghanistan and nothing
more.

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