Russia and the United States should work more closely on missile defence, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Tuesday, after Washington's shelving of a missile shield plan ended a major dispute with Moscow.

"We would like to see Russia and the United States collaborate closely on missile defence," Clinton told reporters after talks with her Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov.

Last month US President Barack Obama's administration scrapped a plan to deploy missile defence facilities in Poland and the Czech Republic and unveiled a new plan involving a mobile system of sea-based interceptors.

Clinton pledged to keep Russia fully informed about the new sea-based missile defence system: "We want to be as transparent as possible for our Russian partners," she said.

Washington is also "very interested" in forming a joint data exchange centre with Moscow and had invited Russian experts to a command centre in the US state of Colorado as part of its transparency efforts, Clinton said.

Russia had fiercely opposed the old eastern Europe missile shield, which had been strongly backed by Obama's predecessor George W. Bush and had been a major irritant in US-Russian relations.

Lavrov said Russia needed more information about the Obama administration's new system before it would become clear whether joint missile defence was possible.

"The more we get to know this new plan, the easier and faster it will be for us to reach an understanding of whether we can jointly develop a project that would unite not just Russia and the United States, but the Europeans," he said.

Such a joint project "would allow collective work on the analysis of existing missile threats, and on the basis of this analysis, the development of measures to counter these threats," Lavrov said.

Russia initially hailed the Obama administration's decision to scrap Bush's missile shield but has also raised doubts about the new sea-based system.

In particular, Russia reacted warily to a report last week that the new system could involve deploying radars in Russia's ex-Soviet neighbour Ukraine, which has an uneasy relationship with Moscow.

The Pentagon denied that it had plans to deploy radars or weaponry in Ukraine as part of the system.