"I could not say that there has been great progress," said Deputy Minister Sergei Kislyak, who led the Russian delegation at the talks, agency Ria Novosti reported.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Monday he was optimistic that a deal could be reached with the United States to resolve the dispute.

The US presented new proposals during Monday's Paris meeting in order to counter stiff opposition by Moscow.

The two parties will meet again on October 3 in Moscow, US Assistant Secretary of State for international security and nonproliferation John Rood said in Paris on Monday.

The United States wants to set up a tracking radar base in the Czech Republic and interceptor missiles in Poland as part of a shield that it maintains could help thwart potential attacks from Iran or North Korea.

Moscow says the US defence plan poses a threat to its security, and has accused Washington of wanting to create a "new Berlin Wall".

Russia's top leaders -- military and civilian alike -- have expressed themselves in no uncertain manner as being opposed to the construction of U.S. anti-ballistic missile bases in Poland -- to house 10 ABM interceptors -- and in the Czech Republic -- to deploy an advanced radar tracking array to guide the interceptors. They have offered the use of an existing Russian radar base in Gabala in Azerbaijan instead. U.S. experts make the point that the Azerbaijani site is not remotely as favorable to track possible future Iranian missiles that may be aimed at Western Europe and the United States as the proposed facilities in the Czech Republic would be. Other Russian experts say the existing facilities at Gabala are inadequate anyway, but that the project is worth developing, and would therefore require a massive upgrade from both Moscow and Washington.

Gabala is therefore the carrot of Russian diplomacy on the BMD bases issue. But Kaliningrad is the stick.

For Russia's leaders have also made clear over the past two months that they would initially respond to the construction of the controversial BMD bases by openly deploying Iskander intermediate-range ballistic missiles in the Kaliningrad oblast, or region.

For Kaliningrad, although utterly ignored by the American news media, remains one of the most important potential flash points and security issues between Russia and the nations of the European Union.

Like East Prussia, the independent city of Danzig -- today Polish Gdansk -- and the Polish corridor in the two decades between World Wars I and II, Kaliningrad is a messy, potentially explosive geopolitical anomaly left over from the Cold War. The region is in an integral part of the Russian federation. But it is cut off from any land contact with the rest of Russia, and its land borders are with Lithuania and Poland, both pro-Western, traditionally fiercely anti-Russian former Soviet client states. Lithuania was forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Union for half a century. Today, both Poland and Lithuania are member states of the European Union and the U.S.-led NATO alliance.

Kaliningrad City was up to 1945 the traditionally German city of Koenigsberg and an ancient center of culture and learning. But in the years since the collapse of communism and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, it has become the Russian "Gibraltar" -- the last outpost of Russian military and strategic power on the Baltic and a potential area from which Moscow could put pressure on Lithuania and Poland.

Therefore, to openly deploy ballistic missiles in the Kaliningrad region would be a huge escalation of tensions between East and West in Central Europe. The threat from the Iskanders would be real enough, but the symbolic value of placing them in Kaliningrad, with the implied threat that would mean to the three Baltic states as well, would speak volumes.

The construction of the two U.S. bases is by no means a done deal. The Democrat-controlled 110th Congress has so far withheld approval to build the interceptor base in Poland. And if Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., wins her party's nomination and the presidency next year -- or if any other Democrat wins control of the White House, for that matter, then the bases program may be quietly scrapped anyway.

Russian officials have also sought to sweeten the Gabala proposal by suggesting the United States and Russia also cooperate on building a new joint radar tracking facility to monitor any Iranian missile threat at Voronezh in central Russia. But there are many reasons why U.S. officials may be skeptical or cautious about that proposal, too.

The final outcome of the BMD bases plan is far from clear, but it remains a classic example of why an operational proposal or deployment may have political and grand strategic consequences out of all proportion to what many people expected.