Russia called on Wednesday for a "reboot" of Europe-Atlantic security arrangements, saying surviving Cold War-era institutions like NATO were ill-suited to defusing tensions in a multipolar world, according to dpa. A senior Russian diplomat, addressing Europe's biggest security and human rights group, expanded on President Dimitry Medvedev's proposal for a new "security architecture" according equal status to all countries without divisions into blocs. Many NATO allies appear willing to discuss the idea but feel it is unworkable unless, they say, Russia itself dispenses with an old "sphere of influence" approach to security. Moscow has accused the United States, NATO's dominant power, of clinging to just that mindset and trying to expand its sphere of influence by erecting a missile shield in central Europe close to Russian borders. "There is a need to reboot the Euro-Atlantic security architecture," Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Groushko told a special session of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe's 56-nation Permanent Council. "We invite all states to come to the negotiating table and work on new rules. We see this as a 'Helsinki (Treaty) plus', where we would discuss new inter-state relations in a legally binding manner," he told the Vienna-based OSCE executive body. A new kind of cooperation was needed to address global security threats, said Groushko, saying the "indivisibility of security" was a principle to be enshrined in the treaty. "We need to renew a very serious dialogue not only on concrete arms control measures, but also on an overall instrument of security in the new context," he said. In response, the ambassador of the Czech Republic, current president of the European Union, said it was open to new security ideas but not to folding institutions that had largely preserved peace and help spread democracy since World War Two. "The EU considers that the comprehensive security architecture developed over years based on existing organisations, shared commitments and principles should not be undermined. The EU remains open to consider ways and means of strengthening them," Ivan Pocuch told the meeting. NATO defence ministers are to meet in Krakow, Poland, on Thursday and Friday. Groushko said the Kremlin backed a German proposal to hold review discussions on the troubled Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe this summer. Moscow suspended its CFE participation in December 2007. He said the OSCE's recent record in dealing with east-west tensions that mushroomed anew last year, when Russian forces ploughed into Georgia to repel Tbilisi's attempt to retake its breakaway South Ossetia region, had been "poor". He said OSCE negotiating forums "are seen to be idling". Western diplomats hold a resurgently nationalist Russia partly responsible for hobbling the consensus-based OSCE. They note Russia's hostility to OSCE election monitoring and its refusal to renew the group's observer mission in Georgia after recognising the "independence" of the pro-Russian separatist regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Last week, after arduous negotiations, the OSCE won Russian agreement to extend the presence of 20 military monitors in June while the group tries to strike a deal with Moscow to maintain its broader mission, whose mandate expired on Dec. 31.
