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DRUDGE: PUTIN INVOKES CUBAN MISSLE CRISIS OVER MISSILE DEFENCE
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PIN THIS: GETTING VERY SERIOUS 
[link to www.ft.com]
Putin invokes Cuban missile crisis
By Tony Barber in Mafra
Published: October 26 2007 20:00 | Last updated: October 26 2007 20:00
Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, on Friday compared US plans to build a missile defence shield near Russia’s borders to the 1962 Cuban missile crisis that brought the world to the brink of nuclear war.
Mr Putin quickly qualified his remarks, made after a summit with European Union leaders in Portugal, by saying that US-Russian relations had moved on since the Cold War and that he and George W. Bush, the US president, had a good personal relationship.
But Mr Putin’s deliberate evocation of one of history’s most dangerous episodes did little to soothe the nerves of his European hosts who, like their US allies, are struggling to stabilise a relationship with Russia that has more points of friction than at any time since the Soviet Union’s demise in 1991.
Mr Putin has never disguised his hostility to the US proposal to station a missile defence system in the Czech Republic and Poland, a plan that he says threatens Russia but which the US says is intended to counter a possible missile threat posed by Iran.
“Analogous actions by the Soviet Union, when it deployed missiles in Cuba, led to the Caribbean crisis. For us today, from a technological viewpoint, the situation is very similar. Such a threat is being set up on our borders,” Mr Putin told a news conference after Friday’s summit.
However, he added: “Happily, we don’t see this as a new Caribbean crisis – nothing of the kind . . . With President Bush, this is a relationship of trust. I think I have the right to call him a personal friend, as he calls me.”
Mr Putin said that, after a recent visit to Moscow by Condoleezza Rice and Robert Gates, the US secretaries of state and defence, he was certain Moscow’s concerns about the plan had been heard in Washington.
“Our US partners must now consider how to neutralise the threats that we believe are materialising,” he said.
Earlier, Mr Putin eased the atmosphere of the EU-Russia summit by saying he would allow observers from the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe to monitor December’s parliamentary elections.
EU leaders praised the move, even though some election specialists say the OSCE observers should have been allowed into Russia much sooner in order to make a proper assessment of the election campaign.
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