Nato, Russia resume ties

CORFU, Greece, (Reuters) - Nato and Russia on Saturday restarted formal cooperation on broad security threats but failed to bridge fierce differences over Georgia in their first high-level talks since the war in the Caucasus region.
The deal emerged after Nato Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said the two sides recognised it was time to crank up joint efforts against Afghan insurgents and drug trafficking, Somali piracy, terrorism and nuclear proliferation.
“We have restarted our relations at a political level, we also agreed to restart the military to military contacts which had been frozen since last August,” Nato Chief Scheffer said, referring to the Russia-Georgia war.
“The Nato-Russia Council is now back in gear. We agreed not to let disagreements bring the whole train to a halt. On Georgia, there are still fundamental differences ... (But) Russia needs Nato and Nato needs Russia.”
“Afghanistan is clearly, also from the Russian side, a dossier where more and closer cooperation is certainly within the range of the possible,” he said, and this could include intensifying counter-narcotics operations. Russian FM was decidedly more reserved about the deal struck with Nato counterparts on the Greek island of Corfu after protracted mutual recriminations over Georgia that sank relations to a post-Cold War low.
Lavrov called the agreement “to a certain extent a positive development” and citing “very frank exchanges”, alluding in part to intractable differences over Georgia’s status.