It’s been 20 years since the Cold War thawed, but Russia’s newest offer to the Pentagon is still a shocker: an aircraft “transit point” for cargo jets headed to Afghanistan. While not a NATO base per se, it will serve military aircraft making their way from the west to Kabul with a facility in the Russian city of Ulyanovsk, about 500 miles east of Moscow.
Cautious U.S. officials are cheering the offer from Vladimir Putin’s ministry of defense and are clearly eager to jump on it as a way to both cut costs and demonstrate rare NATO-Russia cooperation two decades after the Kremlin and White House had nuclear missiles pointed at each other.
“I don’t think it’s a surprise, frankly, that they made such an offer. I mean the reality is that they have a strategic interest in the outcome of events in Afghanistan as well,” said Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Norton Schwartz.
Speaking this week to defense experts at the Atlantic Council, the general was vague on what the military would do at the airport facility other than transfer cargo, but he said it will clearly be for the military even though the Pentagon will not put boots on the ground in Ulyanovsk.
“A transit point is what the Russians are talking about,” he said. “We won’t have uniforms on the ground. This will largely be a commercial operation but whose purpose is well understood,” said Schwartz. “It is again a reflection of our flexibility and our ability collaborate where our interests coincide.”
Russians are even more vague about the situation, maybe because locals are planning to protest it this month. And Pravada this week sized the Russian-NATO deal this way: “NATO base in Russia is like Martians on Earth.” But Schwartz said, “The Russians have actually been helpful to us with respect to maintaining resupply in Afghanistan.”
Any deal would bolster President Obama’s bid to boost relations with Russia. Just last month, while in a meeting with officials, he said that he’d have “more flexibility” to play to Russia’s demands once he is reelected.
