The Russia-NATO Council will resume work at the ambassador level on April 29, Russia’s permanent representative at the alliance, Dmitry Rogozin told Itar-Tass in an interview on Thursday. He confirmed an earlier statement by a senior NATO official the date had been agreed at Wednesday’s meeting of the RNC’s preparatory committee. The Russia-NATO foreign ministers will gather in the middle of May.
The theme of the first meeting will be informal.
“We shall focus on the most practical issues. Our task will be to take a close look at NATO’s latest actions, such as, the final documents of the alliance’ summit in Strasburg and Kiel, in particular, the paragraphs that have a bearing on Russia, including articles on the future of the CFE and missile defense issues, the alliance’s expansion and so on and so forth,” he said.
“We’ve got to realize where the alliance itself is moving, and to build our relations with it accordingly,” Rogozin said.
Measures to improve RNC mechanisms will be another aspect of joint work.
Rogozin said that earlier on Thursday a number of NATO’s member-countries came out with ideas of how to make RNC a more effective mechanism that would allow for maintaining an uninterrupted dialogue “in any kind of weather in our relations.”
The work of the Russia-NATO Council was frozen immediately after Georgia’s invasion of South Ossetia last August. After Rogozin’s request for an emergency RNC meeting the US delegation boycotted the necessary preparatory procedures. As a result, the emergency meeting failed to take place “for technical reasons”, as the alliance’s spokesman explained. Several days later the alliance convened an early meeting of the North Atlantic Council to condemn what it described as Russia’s disproportionate use of force against Georgia and made a decision to freeze RNC’s activities. Only when a new Administration took power in the United States the alliance recognized the need for resuming RNC work and cooperation with Russia.
