U.S. missile defense systems in Japan are designed to offset Russian military capabilities, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov charged Monday.
"For the time being, our U.S. counterparts, just as their predecessors in the Obama and Bush administrations, have been saying we have nothing to worry about, that all that is not against us,” Lavrov said during a news conference Monday. “But there is solid evidence this is not so.”
Lavrov was referring to Japan’s December decision to purchase two land-based Aegis missile defense batteries, derived from the Aegis systems used on American warships. The deals follow a series of North Korean missile launches, including one test that sent a missile over Japanese territory, but Russia still sees them as a troubling expansion of U.S. military power.
"We’ve heard Japan will control this system while the United States will have nothing to do with it at all, but we have serious doubts this will be really so," Lavrov said, according to state-run media.
Lavrov wants Japan to provide assurances that the Aegis systems will be controlled by Japanese rather than American military personnel. "We would like the dialog between the secretaries of the Russian and Japanese security councils to produce more convincing proof,” he said.
The criticism highlights the divergence between Russian and American national security priorities, which has diminished international unity as countries respond to the threat of North Korea. The United States has bolstered its military presence in the region, in part to deter North Korean aggression while pursuing a sanctions campaign designed to drive the regime toward negotiations to dismantle its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile program.
Russia and China concur with western criticisms of North Korea, but they fault the United States for conducting war games in the region and have pushed for a resolution to the crisis that would pause American military activity. It’s the second time in a year that U.S. regional allies have adopted missile defense systems in defiance of their neighbors, as South Korea deployed a Terminal High-Altitude Missile Area Defense battery over Chinese and Russian objections.
The latest weapons deal is a diplomatic setback for Russian President Vladimir Putin, who lobbied Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe against deepening military ties to the United States during a meeting in December of 2016.
“[T]he U.S. uses [North Korea] as a pretext for deploying more advanced weapons in this region,” the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a summary of the Putin-Abe meeting. “Vladimir Putin also talked at length about the US missile defense system, and its willingness to deploy another positioning area in Northeast Asia of what Russia believes to be a global offensive system, supplementing missile-defense bases in Europe, in the Mediterranean and of course in Alaska. We were left with the impression that our Japanese colleagues now have a better understanding of the misgivings Russia has in this respect.”
