Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and French President Nicolas Sarkozy, coming to the United States for a Group of 20 Nations summit confronting economic issues, backed off from their prior harsh comments about the planned European Missile Defense (EMD) system, according to new reports.

The United States would have The Boeing Co. [BA] lead an effort to place EMD interceptors in ground silos in Poland, and a radar in the Czech Republic, to knock down missiles from nations such as Iran that target European cities.

Medvedev, alleging the EMD system would be able to defeat Russian intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), had vowed to place Iskander missiles in Kaliningrad, near the Polish border, and to use them to "neutralize," or annihilate, the EMD silos if they are built. (Please see Space & Missile Defense Report, Monday, Nov. 10, 2008.)

His comments, in public before the Russian parliament, came just as Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), had just been elected president of the United States. Medvedev said he forgot that Obama had just been elected, and that the timing of his bellicose remarks in Moscow was a coincidence.

But during the G-20 meeting, Medvedev was charming, and said he wouldn’t move the Iskanders to Poland, at least not until EMD interceptors were moved there.

The Russian leader also suggested he would like to meet with Obama to discuss issues, beginning with the EMD.

Medvedev even sat down at a summit session and chatted with former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who served under President Clinton and who now is involved in Obama’s transition effort. Obama enters the White House Jan. 20.

Sarkozy, too, backed away from criticisms that the EMD was a wrongheaded proposal and wouldn’t make Europe safer. Rather, Sarkozy now is saying that the EMD could be a complement to protecting Europe from a missile threat, citing Iran as an example.

The change in Sarkozy’s comments came after Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk objected that Sarkozy had no mandate from Poland to make comments critical of the planned EMD. Tusk, and the Polish administration, support the EMD. The Polish parliament has yet to endorse it, however. A parallel situation exists in the Czech Republic.

Meanwhile, however, even as Medvedev was making nice toward Obama, a Russian military expert said Moscow could use something even more effective than Iskander missiles to annihilate the EMD when it is built: precision-guided, nuclear-tipped long range cruise missiles launched from strategic Russian bombers.

Gen. Pyotr Deinekin, a former Air Force commander, said Iskanders wouldn’t be the most effective weapon to neutralize the EMD system, according to the RIA Novosti news agency.

He prefers the "overkill" of a nuclear-tipped Kh-55 (AS-15 Kent) cruise missile with a 4,500 kilometer (2,796 mile) range.