"The Russian side has been advised of this at the diplomatic and military departments [i.e. the Foreign Ministry and the Defence Ministry] of the Republic of Uzbekistan," the source added.

He said the Tashkent representatives with whom he had held consultations had been "very surprised by Robert Simmons’ statement and had described it as ’a revelation without any foundation’".

Simmons, NATO secretary-general’s special representative for the South Caucasus and Central Asia, has said the alliance welcomes Uzbekistan’s willingness to provide its military base at Khonobod for the use of some NATO states. [Passage omitted] He made this statement as a news conference at the head office of Interfax on Wednesday [5 March].

The military-diplomatic source noted that, both as part of its bilateral relations with Russia and through the channels of the Collective Security Treaty, Tashkent must advise its allies, both Russia and other member states of the CSTO [Collective Security Treaty Organization], of any changes to the format of its military relations with third countries.

"There have, however, been no official statements to this effect from Uzbekistan," the source stressed.

"My view - and our Uzbek colleagues share it - is that, in his statement, Mr Simmons most probably mixed up Khonobod with Termez, because it is Termez that Germany uses as a transhipment base. As regards the Khonobod aerodrome, it has been noted in Tashkent that not a single German aircraft has ever landed there," the source told the agency.

He did not rule out the possibility that "Mr Simmons’ statement may be a deliberate act of information-related provocation with the aim of causing tension between Moscow and Tashkent". "Yet he can backtrack by saying that he simply mixed up the names of the aerodromes, which had happened of quite a few occasions," the source told the agency.

Meanwhile the president of the Academy for Geopolitical Problems, Col-Gen Leonid Ivashov, has told Interfax-AVN that NATO member states want permanent rather than temporary presence in Uzbekistan. "NATO countries, and above all the USA, are most likely to move after a while from the temporary, sporadic use of military facilities in Uzbekistan to a permanent presence there. This is not in the interests of Russia or the central Asian states themselves," said Ivashov, who used to be chief of the Main Directorate for International Military Cooperation at the Defence Ministry of the Russian Federation.

The expert pointed out that the US military had visited the Khonobod base a while ago. "Immediately there was a suspicion that President Islom Karimov was shifting his position. I cannot rule out the possibility that he could not withstand tough US pressure and abandoned his previous position," Ivashov said.