Moscow: Russia said it had agreed with the United States to maintain the provisions of a major cold war era nuclear arms control treaty, ahead of its expiry on Friday.
President Barack Obama and his counterpart Dmitry Medvedev today agreed to honour their commitment under the 1991 US-Soviet START nuclear arms control pact expiring at midnight tonight, even as Moscow and Washington were still negotiating hard for its replacement.
"Recognizing our mutual determination to support strategic stability between the United States of America and the Russian Federation, we express our commitment, as a matter of principle, to continue to work together in the spirit of the START Treaty following its expiration," Obama and Medvedev said.
Meanwhile, US and Russian diplomats are negotiating hard to reach a deal for a successor treaty.
In a joint statement, the text of which was released here by the Kremlin, the two leaders also underlined their "firm intention to ensure that a new treaty on strategic arms enter into force at the earliest possible date."
At their maiden meeting in London in April and July summit in Moscow Obama and Medvedev had agreed to complete the negotiations of the new treaty to replace START-1 by its expiry on December 5.
Neither the US nor Russia anticipates security problems after the expiration.
Ratification of a new deal by US Congress and the Russian Duma is likely to take months. Obama and Medvedev initially had set the expiration date as a target for completing negotiations.
The expiring START treaty, signed by Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and President George H.W. Bush, required each country to cut its nuclear warheads by at least one-fourth, to about 6,000, and to implement procedures for verifying that each side was sticking to the agreement.
Moscow's refusal to accept the monitoring of its mobile Topol missiles and allowing the presence of US inspectors at missile production facilities have stalled the talks, even though Washington has scrapped its controversial missile shield plans in Eastern Europe to reach the agreement with Russia.
In their joint statement, the US and the Russian Federation have also reaffirmed their commitment to guarantee the security of former Soviet republics of Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine, who signed the NPT after Soviet collapse as non-nuclear states and handed over the USSR's strategic missiles to Russia.
In this connection, the United States of America and the Russian Federation confirm that the assurances recorded in the Budapest Memoranda will remain in effect after December 4, 2009," the joint statement of the world's biggest nuclear powers said.
- PTI
First Published: Friday, December 04, 2009, 23:49