"The successful training combat launches of strategic missiles have proved a perfect state of our weapons and highest professional skills of Russian soldiers," Manilov told the press on Friday.

"During these launches, a minimum possible deviation of the missiles from planned targets was reached," he said.

In commenting on the U.S. plans to set up a national ABM system, the general said that they "objectively lead to destroying the strategic stability."

The U.S. is trying to defend itself "from hypothetical missile threats which, according to our estimations, do not exist now and will not exist for at least another 10-15 years," Manilov said.

Russia "has proposed a sensible and inexpensive alternative acceptable for all countries, including the European ones: the establishment of a system of non-strategic ABM, which could simultaneously act as a system curbing ballistic threats from non- stable regimes," Manilov said.

NMD Aimed At Russia and China
The comments followed suggestions that the proposed U.S. national defense system (NMD) will be aimed at Russia and China far more than at the so- called rogue states, Col. Gen. Leonid Ivashov, head of the nternational defense cooperation department at the Russian Defense Ministry, said in Moscow on Friday.

Those rogue countries, Iran, Iraq and North Korea, do not have the financial or technological potential of Russia or China to even mount a credible missile program, Ivashov said.

Topol Shows Its Power
Meanwhile, the Russian military is saying that its Topol intercontinental ballistic missiles, which first saw deployment in 1983, could remain part of the Russian Strategic Missile Forces (RVSN) arsenal for yet another ten years.

RVSN press service chief, Col. Ilshat Baichurin told Interfax that Friday's test launch of a Topol "has opened up for the missile forces further opportunities for using this class of missiles as part of the RVSN arsenal for the next five to ten years."

Topol missile complexes have no counterpart in any foreign army, Baichurin went on. "In the RVSN today, they make up half the grouping and have the highest technical readiness coefficient in the world-0.96."

Friday's launch was the 77th for the Topol missile as a class. The missile lifted off from the Plesetsk state testing grounds at 1:43 p.m. Moscow time and hit its pre-designated target at the Kura testing grounds on the Kamchatka peninsula "with maximum precision," the colonel said.

Russia Denies Aiding Missile Proliferation
In separate developments an official spokesman for the Russian Defense Ministry has categorically rejected U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's statement that Russian is actively distributing missile technology, reported Interfax Feb 15.

"Russia is scrupulously honoring its international commitments, including those concerning the regime of non-proliferation of missile technology," head of the Russian Defense Ministry's main department for international military cooperation Col. Gen. Leonid Ivashov told Interfax on Thursday.

Rumsfeld's remarks are yet another attempt to justify the need for Washington to build and deploy a national anti-ballistic missile defense system, Ivashov charged. "Even U.S. allies do not believe the fairytales about the U.S. being threatened by the states mentioned by Rumsfeld, which is evident from the vote on the UN resolution on preserving the ABM Treaty."

No meeting between the Russian defense minister and U.S. secretary of defense is planned for the foreseeable future, he went on to say.

Rumsfeld had said in an interview with PBS television that Russia is selling missile technology to Iran, North Korea, and India, which threatens the U.S., European and Middle Eastern countries.

Copyright 2001 Interfax. All rights reserved. The material on this page is provided by Interfax and may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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