MOSCOW – Russia and the United States exchanged documents Tuesday to enlarge their last nuclear weapons treaty days before it expires, the Kremlin said.
A Kremlin reading of a phone call between US President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin said the two leaders welcomed the exchange of diplomatic notes on the extension of the new START treaty.
“In the coming days, the parties will expand the mandatory procedures that will ensure the long-term operation of this foreign legal tool for nuclear weapons control,” the Kremlin said.
The extension of the pact does not require the approval of the United States Congress, but Russian lawmakers will have to ratify that decision. The main members of the Kremlin-controlled parliament said they would speed up the processing of the factor and take the mandatory steps to enlarge the treaty this week.
The new START expires on February 5. After taking last week, Biden proposed extending the treaty for five years and the Kremlin temporarily welcomed the offer.
The treaty, signed in 2010 through President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, limits the country to no more than 1,550 deployed nuclear warheads and 700 deployed missiles and bombers, and plans to conduct on-site inspections to verify compliance.
Biden said in the crusade that he supported the preservation of the new START treaty, which negotiated his term as vice president of the United States.
Russia has long proposed extending the pact without situations or changes, however, the Trump administration waited until last year to start negotiations and subordinated the extension to a set of demands. Talks have stagnated and the months of negotiations have failed to differentiate.
Negotiations have also been tarnished by tensions between Russia and the United States, which have been fueled by the Ukraine crisis, Moscow interference in the 2016 US presidential election, and irritating ones.
After Moscow and Washington withdrew from the 1987 Intermediate Scope Nuclear Forces Treaty in 2019, New START is the only nuclear weapons agreement between the two countries.
Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, welcomed the “pragmatic and pragmatic decision” to enlarge the treaty, saying it would reduce the arms race and “create the prospect of more ambitious measures to reduce nuclear danger and approach a world without nuclear weapons. “
“The new extension of START will be just the beginning and not the end of U. S. and Russian international relations on nuclear disarmament,” Kimball said in a statement. »
Earlier this month, Russia announced that it would join the United States to withdraw from the Open Skies Treaty, which allowed surveillance flights over army facilities to help build, accept as true and transparent between Russia and the West.
The Kremlin said Putin and Biden discussed the Open Skies Pact and other issues they called tuesday.
While Russia has consistently introduced to make the new START bigger for five years, an option the pact imagined when it was signed, former President Donald Trump has accused this of putting america at a disadvantage. Trump first insisted that China be added to the treaty, a concept that Beijing flatly rejected.
Trump’s leadership then proposed to enlarge the new START for a year and also sought to make it bigger to include limits on nuclear weapons on the battlefield.
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