MOSCOW, March 24. /TASS/. Russia stands ready for dialogue with the US on a new strategic arms reduction treaty; still no end in sight to the Middle East war; and the Iran conflict may affect North Korea’s policies. These stories topped Tuesday’s newspaper headlines across Russia.
Moscow is open to resuming arms control talks despite Washington’s refusal to extend the main parameters of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) for a year, Gennady Gatilov, Russian permanent representative to the United Nations Office in Geneva, told Izvestia. However, in his words, there are currently no military, political and strategic conditions for launching consultations on the issue.
Gatilov emphasized that if multilateral negotiations began, Russia is adamant that the United Kingdom and France join the process as US allies with significant nuclear capabilities. "We believe this is the right approach because these countries plan to quantitatively increase their nuclear arsenals," the diplomat noted.
Russia is wisely looking to mitigate risk, Dmitry Stefanovich, researcher with the Center for International Security at the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of World Economy and International Relations, believes. However, growing cooperation between these countries in the field of nuclear deterrence is forcing Moscow to respond appropriately in both nuclear and non-nuclear areas. In Stefanovich’s view, the likelihood of a multilateral agreement involving all five nuclear-weapon states is extremely low today due to the overall political situation and also because it’s technically difficult to cover mismatched strategic arsenals, which differ in both size and type.
