Secretary Rice: Travel to Russia, March 17-19, 2008
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Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates arrived in Moscow on March 17 for two days of talks with their Russian counterparts. The talks are aimed at gaining ground on key issues that could forge ahead a missile defense plan for all of Europe. The Secretaries held similar consultations with those individuals October 12, 2007. And as in October, the agenda will cover a broad range of bilateral, strategic issues, including missile defense, post START arrangements, cooperation on nonproliferation, as well as counterterrorism.
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Russia Map/Above Info from the DoS website
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Monday, March 17, 2008
The Reuters-India website brings us this report this afternoon and it starts off like this... Russia and the United States expressed optimism on Monday they could improve ties, and Pentagon Chief Robert Gates said a deal might be reached on a U.S. missile shield before the end of the Bush administration... Russia's President Vladimir Putin said he saw a chance to improve relations with the United States after getting what he called a "serious document" from U.S. President George W. Bush... That document, a letter from Bush, laid out topics for discussion both in ongoing meetings and over the longer term, possibly setting the stage for an agreement on the powers' relationship that can be handed off to subsequent Russian and U.S. administrations, American officials said...
Read this news article in full at link below...
Russian, U.S. officials see chance for better ties
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TheMoscowTimes.com reports it this way... President Vladimir Putin said Monday that he saw a chance for an improvement in relations with the United States as a result of a letter he received from U.S. President George W. Bush... The existence of the letter, public details of which remained sketchy, became known through Putin's statement to visiting U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates in the Kremlin on Monday... "It's a serious document and we analyzed it carefully," Putin said of the letter. "If we manage to agree on its main provisions, we will be able to say that our dialogue is progressing successfully."...
Read the rest at link below...
Bush's Letter Puts Putin in a Good Mood
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Telegraph.co.uk reports...
George Bush attempts to end row with Russia
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I’ll end this post with a news article by DoD’s American Forces Press Service...
Openness of U.S.-Russia Talks Pleases Rice, Gates
* CNN brings us the following troubling news this Monday afternoon and it starts off like this… This story is based internal al Qaeda documents, details of which were obtained by CNN. Hundreds of documents were discovered by German cryptologists embedded inside a pornographic movie on a memory disk belonging to a suspected al Qaeda operative arrested in Berlin last year. The German newspaper Die Zeit was the first to report on the documents…
