Powell reassures Russia over bases

MOSCOW -- Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said yesterday the United States might establish military bases in parts of the former Soviet empire, but he sought to reassure Russians that increased US influence in the region does not pose a threat to them.

Russian officials, led by Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov, have protested about US plans to shift part of its European-based military forces east and south. The United States already has troops based in Central Asia, and others are training soldiers in Georgia.

"We are not trying to surround anyone," Powell told Ekho Moskvy, an independent Moscow radio station. "The Cold War is over; the Iron Curtain is down. We should not see things in old Cold War terms."

Powell, finishing a four-day trip to Georgia and Russia, also spoke about the limits the Bush administration faces in war-battered Chechnya. But Powell said he was "impressed" with the "open attitude" of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia toward a US demand that several thousand Russian troops be removed from Georgia.

Powell criticized the Putin government for backsliding on issues of democracy and the rule of law. But Powell said yesterday that Putin had assured him that the prosecution of several jailed Yukos oil company executives would be fair.

US officials have said they think the arrest of the former Yukos chief, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Russia's richest man, was orchestrated to dim his political influence and send a warning to other independent business leaders.

Putin "made clear" that he understood US concerns, Powell said at a forum in Moscow. He added that Putin said the Khodorkovsky case would be handled with "full transparency in accordance with the rule of law."

Before he left Moscow, Powell said the Russians should see the US military moves as positive, given improved US-Russian cooperation against terrorism and trafficking in drugs and people.

"Are we pointing a dagger in the soft underbelly of Russia? Of course not," Powell said. "What we're doing is working together against terrorism."

The United States established bases in the Central Asian countries of Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan to help fight the Afghan war in 2001. The Russians recently opened a base in Kyrgyzstan, a few miles from the US facility. Russia bristled at the US decision in 2002 to help train Georgian forces to expel Muslim rebels and alleged terrorists from the Pankisi Gorge on the border with Chechnya.

In efforts to reduce and realign US forces in Europe, Pentagon officials have discussed Romania, Poland, and Bulgaria as potential sites for US bases.

Powell referred to the sites yesterday as "temporary facilities."

"These would not be big bases of the kind that we had in Germany during the days of the Cold War," Powell said. "These might be small places where we could go and train for a brief period of time or use air bases . . . to get to dangerous places, crisis places, in Central Asia, the Persian Gulf, the Middle East."