President Vladimir Putin played a strong card this week when he warned the United States against encouraging a new cold war in Europe. "Stuffing" the continent with new weapons such as the missile defence shield the US proposes to deploy in Poland and the Czech Republic would do just this, he said.
As he spoke it was announced in Moscow that Russia has successfully tested a new intercontinental missile across Siberia. Russian leaders believe it would insulate them against the new US system. US leaders dismiss such fears, insisting it is intended to deter an attack by rogue states like North Korea or Iran.
Mr Putin has played this divisive issue to maximum advantage when Russia's disagreements with other European states on energy, human rights and the political direction of former Soviet states now in the European Union and Nato are accumulating. He found support in Moscow from the leader of the Socialist Party in the European Parliament, Martin Schultz. "I was able to understand the Russian feelings about this, because it is a complete nonsense. It's our common evaluation of the situation," Mr Schultz said, referring to his parliamentary group. They do not understand why the system is not based in Turkey if deterring Iran is its objective. And there is a wider fear about how these plans tie in with reports that the US is planning a military attack on Iran which might provoke that state into using its missiles.
Mr Schultz is certainly not alone in expressing such reservations. They have been echoed by the German foreign minister and by Democrats in the US House of Representatives. Nor has there been much consultation about the missile system in the Nato alliance. Rather, it has been a unilateral initiative by the Bush administration, pursued immediately after there was a change of government in Poland and the Czech Republic. Russian leaders find it unacceptably intrusive, giving the US access to previously out of bounds information on Russian military capacity. Ten interceptor missiles and a number of new radar bases are planned.
It suits Mr Putin to press home this advantage, since he wants to divide old and new Europe in order to reassert Russian power. This month's EU-Russian summit at Samara illustrated the tactic very well across the whole range of issues discussed, from Polish meat exports to Russian minority rights and energy supplies to western Europe.
It makes no political or military sense to exacerbate these problems with a confrontation over new inter-continental weapons. They would indeed upset the existing balance between nuclear strategic systems on the continent. Dissatisfaction with this is now leading military hawks in Mr Putin's entourage to place a moratorium on the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty, because of alleged non-compliance by Nato. It is high time that European leaders took up these issues directly with the Bush administration, elements of which seem determined to provoke just such a Russian response.