Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov welcomed a US proposal to allow Russian monitors at the planned missile-defence sites in Eastern Europe that Russia views as threat, Russian news reports said Thursday. "The US side is ready to submit an entire package of confidence- building measures to convince us that this system is not directed at us," Lavrov was quoted as saying in an interview with Russian newspaper Izvestia published Thursday. A letter from Washington following Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's visit with Lavrov in Moscow, he said, clarified that an earlier proposal to allow for Russian monitoring of the bases went beyond suggesting a diplomatic presence. "We will have the possibility to watch what the radar is doing and in what actual state of readiness the base's interceptor missiles stand - both with the help of a human factor and by technical means," Lavrov said.
