Under the headline Russia Backs Off on Europe Missile Threat, the NYT’s Stephen Castle hawks several misconceptions. He writes:

President Dmitri A. Medvedev of Russia retreated Friday from his threat to deploy missiles on Europe’s borders, but only if President-elect Barack Obama joined Russia and France in calling for a conference on European security by next summer.

– Russia did not retreat on any missile deployment.
– Russia did not threaten to deploy missiles on ‘Europe’s borders’.

At a meeting in Nice hosted by President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, Mr. Medvedev backed away from the bellicose speech he gave last week, just hours after Mr. Obama won the United States presidential election. On Friday, the Russian leader argued instead that all countries “should refrain from unilateral steps” before discussions on European security next summer.

– The speech referred to was not bellicose.
– The speech was not related to Obama’s election.

Mr. Sarkozy, who presided over the meeting between Russia and the 27 European Union nations in his capacity as the union’s president, helped ease the way for Mr. Medvedev’s retreat. The French leader supported the idea of talks on a new security architecture for Europe and suggested that they could be held by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe in June or July.

– There was nothing taken back by Medvedev in relation to a European security conference.

– By achieving Sarkozy’s support for such a conference Russia won a major point.

Let us start with that ‘bellicose speech’:

Each year the Russian president has to make a ‘state of the nation’ speech to the parliament. This years speech was supposed to be held on October 23 but was postponed twice:

Speculation
surfaced that quickly changing world economic conditions were forcing
Medvedev to rewrite his remarks, forcing its delay.

It
was pure coincident that the speech was held shortly after the U.S.
election and it has nothing to do with the U.S. election or Obama.

Neither was the speech bellicose. Ninety percent of it was on economic, social and inner-Russian political issues. With regard the U.S. ‘missile defense’ plans Medvedev said:

"An Iskander missile system will be deployed in the Kaliningrad Region to neutralize if necessary the anti-ballistic missile system in Europe," Medvedev said in his first state of the nation address to parliament.

The conditional stationing of Iskander’s in Kalinigrad had already been announced back in July.
Medvedev’s statement was thereby nothing new. It was clearly a
conditioned statement and up to today that condition has not changed
one bit. So where is the Russian ‘retreat’?

Castle and his editors could, by the way, use some geographic lessons. Kaliningrad clearly lies deep within Europe’s borders.

There was another part in Medvedev’s speech that should concern U.S.
citizens much more than short-range missiles in Kalinigrad but went, to
my knowledge, unreported in any U.S. media. Medvedev announced:

"We
earlier planned to remove three missile regiments of a missile division
deployed in Kozelsk [Kaluga Region] from combat duty and disband the
division by 2010. I have made a decision to withdraw these plans,"
Medvedev said, noting that Russia had been forced to take this measure.

The division has RS-18 Stiletto intercontinental ballistic missiles with a range of 10,000 kilometers (6,200 miles).

The
distance from Kaluga Region to New York is 4,700 miles. Because of the
so called ‘missile defense’ the U.S. hawks want to install in Poland
and Czechia, Russia reversed plans for a unilateral reduction of
intercontinental missiles. The potential threat to the U.S. mainland
will now be bigger than necessary. Why is this not discussed in any
U.S. media?

The call for a new security architecture in Europe is a Russian idea and again nothing new:

Russian
President Dmitry Medvedev used his visit to Berlin on June 5 for
proposing an all-European security pact with Russia’s participation,
inherently in opposition to NATO (Interfax, Itar-Tass, June 5, 6).
…
Once
approved, the pact would be legally binding, in the form of a second
edition of the OSCE’s 1976 Helsinki Final Act. The Kremlin wants a new
pact to be approved at an all-European summit.

So
far Medvedev’s calls for such a security pact had been left without
official answer from ‘western’ leaders. The U.S. has informally opposed
any such conference. To now have French and EU support for such a
conference is a major diplomatic win for Russia.

The NYT clearly has a warped view on Russia. It sees a threat where
there is a conditional answer to U.S. aggression. It sees a Russian
retreat and loss when there is a big diplomatic victory and the real
loser here is bellicose U.S. policy.

The NYT fails to report that Sarkozy thinks the U.S. plans for
‘missile defense’ in Europe are nuts. Even the Wall Street Journal does
a better job here:

"Deployment of a missile-defense system would bring nothing to security
in Europe … it would complicate things, and would make them
move backward."
Mr. Sarkozy said many European leaders shared his assessment, …

This
is the real news from the EU-Russia conference, and it is very good
news. Russia ‘backing off’ from a response to U.S. aggression is pure
fantasy.

Such fantasies are dangerous as the can lead to wrong decisions in very serious matters.