NATO resumes contact with Russia

1st high-level meeting since Georgia war

BRUSSELS - Moscow said it would insist on determining the cause of the August war in Georgia as NATO and Russia resumed diplomatic contacts that had been suspended since then.

NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer and Dmitry Rogozin, Moscow's ambassador to the alliance, met over lunch yesterday in the first high-level meeting after a four-month hiatus.

The informal meeting aimed to explore how formal contacts could be restarted.

"They agreed to look at ways to restart the engagement," said NATO spokeswoman Carmen Romero.

She said the two sides would look to hold an informal meeting of the NATO-Russia Council - a consultative panel set up in 2002 to improve relations between the former Cold War foes - at ambassadorial level next month.

Rogozin said his lunch with de Hoop Scheffer in an Italian restaurant near NATO headquarters was a step toward normalization of relations.

"The most difficult thing is to make the first step," he said. "We are at the beginning of the difficult route to restore trust."

In Moscow, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said the Russian side wanted to discuss the root causes of the brief war in which Russian forces occupied large swaths of Georgia after Georgian troops shelled and invaded the breakaway region of South Ossetia. The United States and some Eastern Europe nations have blamed Moscow for causing the bloodshed, but Moscow says its military actions were defensive and in response to Georgia's aggression.

"Now, when our NATO colleagues talk about restoring relations, we will insist that the restoration of ties start with the discussion of the causes of the Caucasus crisis which our NATO partners dodged in August," Lavrov said.

Rogozin said that inquiries conducted since the conflict showed conclusively that Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili was responsible for launching the war and that NATO would have to acknowledge that.

"We have to jointly analyze what happened in August," he said. "We cannot pretend that nothing happened to change our relations."

Despite NATO's decision to suspend high-level contacts with Moscow after the August war, cooperation continued on a number of issues, such as combating piracy off the Somali coast.

Moscow also has agreed to let the alliance use its territory to resupply the 62,000 Western troops in Afghanistan - an issue of growing urgency for NATO because of the intensifying attacks by pro-Taliban forces on transport convoys in Pakistan.

Also yesterday, a senior Russian general said in Moscow that the military will cut some weapons programs if the United States drops its missile defense plans.

The Interfax news agency quoted Colonel-General Nikolai Solovtsov as saying that the Russian armed forces wouldn't need some prospective strategic weapons if the new US administration changes its mind about deploying missile sites in Europe.