MOSCOW, June 3: Russia stepped up its Cold War rhetoric on Sunday with President Vladimir Putin warning it would point missiles at European targets if the US expands its nuclear defences near its borders.

Together with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov Putin upped the stakes in a war of words with Washington over US missile defence shield plans that have caused a sharp downward spiral in relations.

“If the US nuclear potential extends across the European territory, we will get new targets in Europe,” he said in an interview with newspapers from the Group of Eight industrialised nations.

“It will then be up to our military experts to identify which targets will be aimed by ballistic missiles and which ones will be aimed by cruise missiles,” he said.

Lavrov, meanwhile, shrugged off American insistence that its plan to deploy missile defence hardware in Poland and the Czech Republic posed no threat, casting it as an attempt to encircle Russia militarily.

The US plan “wonderfully fits the overall picture of American global anti-missile defence, which according to our analysis -- just look at the map -- is being deployed along Russia's perimeter, and also China's, incidentally.” “If strategic components of the American arsenal appear in Europe near our borders, we are obliged to ... cut off potential threats from that deployment,” Lavrov said in comments broadcast on the state-run television channel Vesti-24.

After warning repeatedly that the US proposals would set off a new arms race, Moscow tested a new multi-warhead missile last week that Putin said was a direct response to US actions.

The interview with Putin was due to be published on Monday but pre-released by Germany's Der Spiegel magazine. Putin and his peers are meeting for a three-day G8 summit which begins in Germany on Wednesday.—AFP