PRESIDENT Vladimir Putin denied today that Russia has plans to deploy electronic monitoring equipment to the Lourdes signals intelligence facility in Cuba.

“Russia is capable of fulfilling its defence capacity tasks without this component,” he said.

The facility was created by the Soviet Union in the 1960s at the height of the cold war when a US invasion of Cuba was still feared. Its role was to monitor US missile launches and perform electronic listening functions. Lourdes also provided stable communications with Soviet embassies in Latin America.

The base was downscaled after the Soviet Union’s collapse but it continued operations, with Moscow paying about $200 million (£117m) a year to Havana as rent.

Washington pressed Moscow during the 1990s, when president Boris Yeltsin reduced Russia’s economy to a basket case, to abandon Lourdes, passing the Russian-American Trust and Co-operation Act to ban the US government from rescheduling or forgiving any Russian debt to the US unless it renounced Lourdes.

Russia complied in 2001, also closing its naval base in Vietnam’s Cam Ranh Bay as a “gesture of goodwill.”

Speaking in Brasilia yesterday, President Putin regretted his country’s suspension of co-operation with Cuba in the early 1990s, noting that Canadian and European countries had taken Russia’s place.

“We have very good relations and a very good historical foundation,” he said.

“The country has achieved really good results in the social sphere, in education and medicine. Generally, we have joint projects and we have plans,” he added.

He agreed last week to write off 90 per cent of Cuba’s Soviet-era debts.