NOVOSIBIRSK, June 6. /ITAR-TASS/. Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin hopes Russia and the United States will agree on deployment of GLONASS and GPS stations before September 1.
"I hope we have been heard not only in navigation departments, but first of all in Washington. I hope we will find full understanding by September 1, or we will have to do something with the stations," Rogozin told a meeting of the Technoprom 2014 forum.
Cooperation with the United States in the area of navigation should continue despite problems, Rogozin said. "Despite some difficulties we have with the United States, we believe it is necessary to continue cooperation," the deputy prime minister stressed.
Russia has recently made a statement that cooperation in the navigation sphere should be formed on the basis of certain parity and proportionality, he noted.
"If we have been surprisingly confronted with the fact that GPS stations placed by the United States in the early 1990s are still working in the Russian territory (and we have eleven of them), perhaps we had the right to expect it to be possible to deploy similar GLONASS stations on the territory of the United States," Rogozin said.
"Here we faced an obvious politicization of the issue. Some statements were made that Russian stations would play the role of spies."
To stop the politicization, since June 1 the American stations have been subject to influence, after which it became impossible to use them for military purposes, Rogozin said. "Thus, since June 1, none of you has felt any problems as civilian users, but nevertheless it makes no sense to use them for military purposes," he explained.
The vice-premier reminded three months were left to finally settle the issue till September 1.