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MOSCOW (AP) – The Kremlin on Friday welcomed US President Joe Biden’s proposal to extend the latest nuclear arms control treaty between the two countries, which is expected to expire in less than two weeks.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Russia supports the extension of the pact and is waiting to see details of the US proposal.
The White House said Thursday that Biden had offered Russia a five-year extension of the new START treaty.
“We can only welcome the political will to expand the document,” Peskov said on a conference call with reporters. “But it will all depend on the details of the proposal.”
The treaty, signed in 2010 by President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, limits each country to no more than 1,550 nuclear warheads deployed and 700 missiles and bombers deployed, and plans to conduct on-site inspections to verify compliance. It expires on February 5.
Russia has long offered to extend the pact without any conditions or changes, but President Donald Trump’s administration waited until last year to begin negotiations and made the extension conditional on a set of demands. Talks have stalled and months of negotiation have failed to narrow the differences.
“Some conditions for the extension have been proposed, and some of them have been absolutely unacceptable to us, so let’s first see what the United States is proposing,” Peskov said.
Mikhail Ulyanov, Russian ambassador to international organizations in Vienna, also hailed Biden’s proposal as an “encouraging step.”
“The extension will give both sides more time to consider possible additional measures aimed at strengthening strategic stability and global security,” he tweeted.
Biden has indicated during the campaign that he is in favor of preserving the new START treaty, which was negotiated during his tenure as U.S. vice president.
Discussions over the extension of the treaty were also clouded by tensions between Russia and the United States, which were fueled by the Ukraine crisis, Moscow’s interference in the 2016 US presidential election and other irritants. .
Despite the extension proposal, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Biden remained committed to holding Russia “accountable for its reckless and contradictory actions,” such as his alleged involvement in the event. Solar Winds hack, 2020 election meddling, opposition chemical poisoning. figure Alexei Navalny and the widely reported allegations that Russia offered bounties to the Taliban to kill US soldiers in Afghanistan.
Asked to comment on Psaki’s statement, Peskov reiterated Russia’s refusal to get involved in such activities.
Following Moscow and Washington’s withdrawal from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 2019, New START is the only nuclear arms control agreement between the two countries.
Supporters of arms control have strongly called for the preservation of New START, warning that its abandonment would remove all control over US and Russian nuclear forces.
Last week Russia also said it would follow the United States to withdraw from the Open Skies Treaty allowing surveillance flights over military installations to help build trust and transparency between Russia and the United States. West.
While Russia has consistently offered to extend the new START for five years – a possibility the pact contemplates – Trump asserted that this put the United States at a disadvantage and initially insisted that China be added to the treaty, an idea that Beijing has categorically rejected. The Trump administration then proposed to extend the new START for just one year and also sought to expand it to include limits on nuclear weapons on the battlefield.
Moscow said it remained open to further nuclear weapons negotiations with the United States to negotiate future limits on potential weapons, but stressed that preserving the new START is essential for global stability.
Russian diplomats have said Russia’s future Sarmat heavy intercontinental ballistic missile and Avangard hypersonic glider vehicle could be counted with other Russian nuclear weapons under the treaty.
Sarmat is still under development, while the first armed missile unit of the Avangard became operational in December 2019.
The Russian military said the Avangard was capable of flying 27 times faster than the speed of sound and could perform abrupt maneuvers on its way to a target to bypass missile defense systems. It was installed on the existing intercontinental ballistic missiles of Soviet construction instead of older type warheads, and could in the future be installed on the more powerful Sarmat.
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