RUSSIA: Russia underlined its opposition to war in Iraq yesterday and suggested that the United States was targeting Saddam Hussein to make up for its failure to catch Osama bin Laden.
"Russia believes there are no grounds at the moment for the use of military force against Iraq," Foreign Minister Mr Igor Ivanov said in Athens, where he was to meet European Union ministers.
"The efforts of the international community must now be directed at helping international inspectors complete their mission. This is the direction we intend to pursue."
President Putin said in a statement that the key to future action on Iraq would be found in next week's report by UN arms inspectors to the Security Council.
Moscow, with deep economic interests in Iraq, has joined China, France and Germany in rejecting military action against Baghdad without clear authorisation by the Security Council - where Moscow, Paris and Beijing have veto power.
In an interview published yesterday in Trud newspaper, Mr Ivanov also suggested that the United States' focus on Iraq springs from its failure to catch Osama bin Laden.
"We don't agree with denouncing Iraq as the centre of world evil in an attempt to compensate for the failure to find bin Laden," Mr Ivanov said.
He also reiterated Moscow's commitment to defuse the standoff through the UN Security Council, but said the current resolution only covered the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and offered no provision for an attack on the Gulf state or its leader.
"There is no mention anywhere in [the resolution] of regime change. It is not one of the functions of the United Nations to state which regime should exist in which country," Mr Ivanov said, going on to deny rumours that Russian diplomats were trying to persuade Saddam to go into exile to avert the threat of war.
"We have never done that," he said. "It would be tantamount to meddling in Iraqi domestic politics."