Moscow/Warsaw/Washington - The office of Barack Obama Saturday said the president-elect has no commitment to building a missile defence shield in Eastern Europe.

The statement from Denis McDonough, Obama's senior foreign policy adviser, came as Russia and Poland jockeyed for attention from the administration-in-waiting over the disputed defence system that Poland and Czech Republic have approved.

Russia regards the proposed system as a security threat to itself and its former sphere of influence in Eastern Europe.

On the day after Obama's commanding victory in the US elections, Russian president Dmitri Medvedev announced Moscow would deploy short-range Iskander missiles in the Baltic Sea enclave of Kaliningrad bordering with Poland as a retaliatory step.

In Sharm-el-Sheikh, Egypt, where the so-called Middle East quartet was preparing to meet Sunday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Saturday that Russia wanted to negotiate with Obama about the plans.

"I think that we could hold detailed discussions about this question by the end of the year," Lavrov said, after meeting with his US colleague Condoleezza Rice in Egypt, according to an Interfax agency report in Moscow.

Medvedev spoke with Obama on the telephone on Saturday, and the two men agreed on a meeting within the "near future."

On Friday, Polish President Lech Kaczynski also spoke with Obama, and said on his website that Obama reassured him "that the anti- missile shield project will be continued," Bloomberg news agency reported.

In the statement from Obama's office on Saturday, McDonough said that Obama's position "is as it was throughout the campaign, that he supports deploying a missile defense system when the technology is proved to be workable."

"President Kaczynski raised missile defense, but President-elect Obama made no commitment on it," McDonough was quoted as saying.

Obama had a "good conversation" with Kaczynski and Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk about the "important US-Poland alliance," McDonough said.

In August, the US signed an agreement with the Polish government agreeing to modernize Poland's military in exchange for the former Soviet satellite's hosting 10 interceptor missiles.

President George W Bush says the two-pronged defensive shield in Czech Republic and Poland is needed to protect against attack from Iran and other "rogue" states. (dpa)