Geneva:
Senior U.S. and Russian officials on Wednesday restarted talks on easing tensions involving the world’s biggest nuclear weapons powers and agreed to reconvene in September right after informal consultations, the State Department mentioned.
U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman and Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov headed their delegations at the meeting at the U.S. diplomatic mission in Geneva.
TASS news agency cited Ryabkov as saying he was happy with the consultations and that the United States showed readiness for a constructive dialogue at the talks.
Armed with mandates from their leaders, it was the very first time in almost a year that the sides had held so-named strategic stability talks amid frictions more than a variety of problems, which includes arms handle.
U.S. President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose nations hold 90% of the world’s nuclear weapons, agreed to launch a bilateral dialogue on strategic stability to “lay the groundwork for future arms control and risk reduction measures”.
After informal consultations aimed at “determining topics for expert working groups” in the next round, the two sides agreed to reconvene in late September, State Department spokesman Ned Price mentioned in a statement.
Calling the discussions “professional and substantive,” he mentioned the U.S. side discussed its policy priorities, the present international safety atmosphere, “the prospects for new nuclear arms control” and the format for additional talks.
Andrey Baklitskiy, senior study fellow at the Center for Advanced American Studies at Moscow State Institute of International Relations, told reporters in Geneva: “We are starting with a new U.S. administration, starting pretty much from scratch.
“It’s just meet and greet and attempt to establish some fundamental understandings,” he said.
Russia in January approved a five-year extension of the bilateral New START nuclear arms control treaty days before it was set to expire. The treaty limits the numbers of strategic nuclear warheads, missiles and bombers that Russia and the United States can deploy.
The two sides had been expected to discuss which weapons systems and technologies are of greatest concern.
“For instance, Russia nonetheless has issues with U.S. modification of heavy bombers and launchers to launch ballistic missiles, and that is been there for a though now,” Baklitskiy mentioned.
The Biden administration has asserted that Russia has engaged unilaterally in low-yield nuclear testing, in violation of a nuclear testing moratorium, he mentioned.
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