MOSCOW – Russian and US negotiators are to resume arms control meetings next week to try to finalise a deal, the Russian foreign ministry said yesterday.
Negotiators “progressed significantly toward agreement on the remaining questions” during a month-long round of talks that ended on Saturday in Geneva, it said in a statement.
Russian and US negotiators have been working for months to hammer out a successor to the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (Start 1). They missed a target of December 5th, when Start expired, and officials have voiced hope that a new pact cutting the world’s largest nuclear arsenals could be signed before May.
The sides agreed to resume negotiations on March 9th, “with the aim of finalising the future treaty and presenting it for signing by the presidents of Russia and the United States”, the ministry said.
A US spokesman in Geneva said the teams had returned home.
“The two sides are continuing to work and consult with one another,” he added.
US president Barack Obama and Russian president Dmitry Medvedev have agreed the treaty must cut deployed warheads to between 1,500 and 1,675 on both sides. – (Reuters)