Russia's Putin Shuns Spy Conspiracy Talk

President Vladimir Putin, left, and Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov seen during their meeting in the Kremlin in Moscow, Wednesday, Jan. 31, 2007. (AP Photo/ITAR-TASS, Dmitry Astakhov, Presidential Press Service) (Dmitry Astakhov - AP)

MOSCOW -- President Vladimir Putin said Thursday that Russia faces unfair criticism and needless military threats from the West, lashing out in an annual news conference at U.S. plans to deploy missile defenses in Eastern Europe and rejecting grumbling that he is using Russia's gas and oil exports as political weapons.

Putin fielded questions from reporters for more than 3 1/2 hours, but left some key questions unanswered: whom he wants to succeed him next year, and whom he believes is behind the recent shocking slayings of Kremlin critics.

After seven years in power, Putin described Russia as economically robust but plagued by an income divide, uneasy about the intentions of the United States, and insistent on its own reliability as a major energy supplier to Europe.

Russia's relations with the West are a perennial topic at the news conference, which gives foreign journalists a rare chance to ask Putin questions _ and gives the president the opportunity to portray Russia, as he often does, as a country unfairly criticized by foreigners who do not wish it well.

Putin denounced the possible deployment of elements of an American missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic, scoffing at U.S. claims that they would be aimed at intercepting missiles from Iran. He said Russia would take unspecified retaliatory measures.

"We consider such claims unfounded, and, naturally, that directly concerns us and will cause a relevant reaction," Putin said. "That reaction will be asymmetrical, but it will be highly efficient."

As he has before, Putin said Russia's latest Topol-M intercontinental ballistic missiles were capable of penetrating missile defenses and added that Moscow is developing more effective weapons against which anti-missile systems would be "helpless."

After energy price disputes with Belarus interrupted Russian oil supplies to Europe this winter, Western concerns about Russia's reliability as an energy supplier grew. But Putin rejected suggestions that the country is using energy as a political weapon.

"The thesis is being thrust on us all the time that Russia is using its old and new economic efforts to attain foreign policy goals. It is not so," Putin said, adding that journalists who advanced such ideas were "ill-wishers."

Also seeking to harm Russia, he said, are "oligarchs who have fled" Russia to avoid prosecution and live in Western Europe or the Middle East _ clear references to bitter Kremlin critics, including Boris Berezovsky, granted political asylum in Britain, and Leonid Nevzlin, who lives in Israel.

Before his death Nov. 23, Alexander Litvinenko _ a former KGB counterintelligence officer _ charged that Putin was behind his poisoning with the radioactive element polonium-210, and the contract-style slaying of Anna Politkovskaya, a journalist who exposed human rights abuses in Chechnya.

Russian prosecutors, pro-Kremlin lawmakers and state-controlled media, meanwhile, have suggested that Berezovsky or Nevzlin could have ordered Litvinenko's death.