Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev said that rapprochement between Russia and NATO was natural and this should be taken as a positive factor, RIA Novosti reports.
Last week NATO and Russia pledged to start a new era of wide-ranging cooperation, announcing plans to work together on missile defense, Afghanistan and other issues.
The "cooling-off period" in relations between Russia and NATO is over, NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said. "This convergence was natural, it's time for these encounters, and we should take this as a positive factor," President Nazarbayev told Russia's Vesti TV program, broadcast on Saturday in the Russian Far
East.
"Drug trafficking, piracy ... Today we see what is happening on the Korean peninsula. This requires an international force, which will protect our planet and humanity. And Russia's participation in this is natural... And in NATO they understand that they cannot do that without Russia," Kazakh president said.
Russia and NATO have completed negotiations on drafting an agreement allowing the NATO alliance to carry supplies to and from Afghanistan across Russian territory, Rasmussen said. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev signalled Moscow's willingness to work with the military alliance on the creation of a missile defense
system in Europe at NATO's Lisbon summit.Russia is also ready to cooperate with NATO in monitoring nuclear programs in other countries.
The NATO-Russia Council agreed to resume theater missile defense exercises and continue cooperation on the joint assessment of ballistic missile threats and the fight against sea piracy.
