US, Russia to forge new treaty after expiry of START

: Washington and Moscow pledged on Friday to uphold the ‘spirit’ of the START nuclear arms treaty and to seek a new agreement as soon as possible, hours before the landmark 1991 pact was to expire.
US President Barack Obama and his Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev said in a joint statement they would keep pushing for nuclear disarmament, despite failing to cut a last-minute deal by the treaty’s December five expiration date.
‘We express our commitment, as a matter of principle, to continue to work together in the spirit of the START Treaty following its expiration, as well as our firm intention to ensure that a new treaty on strategic arms enter into force at the earliest possible date,’ the statement said.
The Obama administration had pushed hard for a new START agreement as part of its efforts to improve strained US ties with Russia, but disputes over US monitoring of Russian missiles had bogged down talks in recent weeks.
Signed in 1991, the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty led to deep cuts in the US and Russian nuclear arsenals and came to be seen as a cornerstone of strategic arms control.
US and Russian negotiators had held frenetic talks in Geneva in recent weeks to thrash out a successor to the hugely complex treaty.
Mr Obama and Mr Medvedev spoke by telephone on Friday and agreed to give an ‘additional impulse’ to the Geneva negotiations, the Kremlin said in a statement.
Hours before the midnight deadline, there was no sign of a last-minute deal, nor was there any announcement of an interim agreement to extend verification measures from the 1991 treaty. Such measures had helped build trust between the former Cold War foes and reduce the threat of nuclear Armageddon.
Facing the end of the treaty, a US inspection team on Friday ended nearly 20 years of monitoring at Russia’s leading missile-production plant. The 20 US inspectors quit their posts at the plant in Votkinsk, about 580km northeast of Moscow, a spokesman for the US Embassy in Moscow said.
Russia had reportedly been opposed to the inspections continuing, saying they were unfair and unilateral given that Moscow had recalled its own inspectors at similar US missile sites in 2001.
‘The firm position of the Russian delegation hinges on the departure of the unilateral US military inspections from Votkinsk,’ a source close to the talks told the RIA-Novosti news agency.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said it would not take much longer to agree on the replacement treaty. ‘We’re working on it. As soon as it is ready it will be signed. It shouldn’t take too long,’ he told reporters in Brussels.