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Russia says it will not renew arms agreement with U.S.
Russia's Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov speaks during a news briefing in the main building of Foreign Ministry in Moscow, December 15, 2008.
Credit: Reuters/Denis Sinyakov
MOSCOW |
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia will not renew a decades-old agreement with Washington on dismantling nuclear and chemical weapons when it expires next year, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov was quoted as saying on Wednesday.
The death of the 1991 agreement, which had been renewed twice, is the latest in a series of hitches in relations between the United States and Russia and casts doubt on the future of the much-vaunted "reset" in relations between the Cold War-era foes.
"The basis of the program is an agreement of 1991 which, by virtue of the time when it was conceived, the way it was worked out and prepared, does not meet very high standards. The agreement doesn't satisfy us, especially considering new realities," Interfax quoted him as saying.
U.S. Senator Richard Lugar, a veteran disarmament campaigner, was in Moscow in August to push for the renewal of the program, known as the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction program, which he helped launch.
The project, intended to dismantle nuclear and chemical weapons in the former Soviet Union, was last ratified by Russia in 2006 and is due to expire in 2013. Aides said it had resulted in the deactivation of more than 7,650 strategic warheads.
Ryabkov said that Russia now had the finances to carry out its own programs and that Moscow was interested in continuing partnerships in third countries.
During his trip to Moscow Lugar said he had brought up the idea of Moscow and Washington working together to reduce Syria's chemical weapons stockpiles, though he said response to the idea had been cool.
A number of bilateral agreements including the latest START nuclear arms treaty, put in force in February 2011, have built the foundation for the U.S.-Russia "restart" initiated by Washington when President Barack Obama took office in 2008.
That treaty lowers the ceilings on stocks of long-range weapons.
But recently ties have been strained, most notably by Moscow's decision to close the office of the U.S. Agency for International Development in Moscow, which critics say is part of a broader Kremlin crackdown on pro-democracy groups.
(Reporting By Thomas Grove; Editing by Michael Roddy)
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Now you also know why the hated Communist Red Star was never removed from the bows of Russian Naval vessels and the wings of Russian military aircraft, and is placed on all new Russian Naval vessels and military aircraft. Because the Communist Party officer corps that controlled the Russian military in late 1991 never left their positions. The same for the KGB, controlled by Soviet era Communist Party members
For more on this subject, read KGB defector Major Anatoliy Golitsyn’s 1984 book, “New Lies for Old” (available at Internet Archive), the only Soviet era defector to still be under protective custody in the West (what does that tell you?).
A ‘behind-closed-doors’ battle for control of the Internet is likely to put ‘government handcuffs’ on the web, and threatens to end a free and open internet, it has emerged. The International Telecommunications Union (ITU), a United Nations organisation representing 193 countries, will hold a summit in Dubai in December where member countries will negotiate a treaty that sets out regulations on how international voice, data and video traffic is handled. They are also proposing a tax on the exhange of information.
Times are changing fast :/ Now we know what Obama meant when he said he’d have more flexibility AFTER the election. Russia is grand standing to downplay the upcoming snatch and grab of the free web.
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