Putin compares U.S. missile shield to Cuban crisis

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Putin compares U.S. missile shield to Cuban crisis
Fri Oct 26, 2007 11:46am EDT

MAFRA, Portugal (Reuters) - Russia's President Vladimir Putin drew a parallel on Friday between U.S. plans for a missile shield in Europe and the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, widely regarded as the closest the world came to nuclear war.

"I would remind you how relations were developing in an analogous situation in the middle of the 1960s," he said when asked at a news conference about Washington's plans to station elements of a missile defense shield in eastern Europe.

"Analogous actions by the Soviet Union when it deployed rockets on Cuba provoked the Cuban missile crisis," Putin said after an EU-Russia summit in Portugal.

"For us, technologically, the situation is very similar. On our borders such threats to our country are being created.

"Thank God, we do not have any Cuban missile crisis now and this is above all because of the fundamental way relations between Russia and the United States and Europe have changed," Putin said.

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