Nov. 24 (Bloomberg) -- Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said President-elect Barack Obama may be open to compromise on plans to deploy parts of a missile defense system in eastern Europe.

“Dialogue is possible and a change of position is possible,” Medvedev said at a news conference in Lima, where he attended the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit. Obama’s administration may even “renounce” the project, he said.

President George W. Bush’s plans to station a radar base in the Czech Republic and interceptor missiles in Poland, both former members of the Warsaw Pact group of countries the Soviet Union set up to counter NATO, have strained U.S.-Russia ties. The U.S. says the shield aims to protect against an attack from Iran, while Russia maintains the system will blunt its nuclear deterrent.

Medvedev’s comments were more conciliatory than his Nov. 5 state of the nation address, when he vowed to deploy short-range missiles in the western enclave of Kaliningrad on the Polish border to counter the anti-missile shield.

“I have said quite frankly that we do not want to deploy anything,” Medvedev told reporters late yesterday. “It will only be a response measure and all will depend on the position of our American partners.”

Obama’s office said Nov. 8 the president-elect had made “no commitment” to the planned missile-defense system.

Medvedev said the Bush administration had proven “extremely inflexible” on missile defense.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said after speaking with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in Peru that the U.S. had failed to ease Russia’s concerns over the system.

“We reiterated our attitude toward missiles in Europe,” Lavrov told reporters in Lima yesterday. The U.S. must “renounce unilateral deployment of such a system and agree to work together jointly from scratch.”

He said Russia would respond to U.S. proposals aimed at allaying concerns about the shield, including allowing Russian officers to visit the shield sites, next month.

To contact the reporters on this story: Lyubov Pronina in Lima via the Moscow newsroom at lpronina@bloomberg.net;

Last Updated: November 23, 2008 20:26 EST