RUSSIA AND the United States may sign an agreement to replace the Start nuclear weapons treaty during the Copenhagen climate summit, a Russian source told Reuters yesterday.
The presidents of the United States and Russia will go to the Danish capital later this week to attend the climate conference, and agreement on cutting their nuclear arsenals would signal that previously tense relations are easing.
Russian president Dmitry Medvedev will be joined by his foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, said the source, evidence Russia believed the new treaty could be signed with President Barack Obama there.
Mr Lavrov said on December 9th that “the treaty will be signed soon” but declined to elaborate. The White House declined to comment yesterday.
Washington and Moscow failed to reach agreement on a successor to the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, the biggest agreed nuclear weapons cut in history, before December 5th when the pact had been due to expire. However, both sides agreed it should remain in force pending agreement on a successor.
Negotiators in Geneva failed to meet the deadline because they had only spent a few months in talks, compared with years spent formulating previous treaties, said Fyodor Lyukanov, the editor of Russia in Global Affairs.
“I think it is widely anticipated and expected. They didn’t meet the desired deadline due to technical details. But it was sure they would do it before the end of the year,” he said.
“Copenhagen is a good opportunity for both presidents to meet, show they are fighting climate change and sign this document.
“It creates a good atmosphere and is the first legal document in many years signed by America and Russia demonstrating they can do a deal together,” he told Reuters.
The Start-1 treaty, signed by then US president George HW Bush and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, took nearly a decade to achieve. Under the deal, Russia more than halved its nuclear arsenal.
Over the past decade, relations between Moscow and Washington became strained over the Iraq war, Nato’s eastward expansion and last year’s Georgia war, but Mr Obama pledged to improve ties when he became president.
Last July, Mr Obama and Mr Medvedev outlined a framework for the new treaty, restricting deployed strategic warheads to between 1,500 and 1,675 and delivery platforms to between 500 and 1,100.