Russia offers nuclear cuts, objections to US proposal
MOSCOW - President Dmitri A. Medvedev said yesterday that Russia is prepared to carry out significant reductions in its nuclear arsenal as part of its continuing arms control negotiations with the United States, which are to culminate in a summit meeting with President Obama next month in Moscow.
His comments were among the clearest yet by Russia outlining its position on arms control.
But Medvedev, issuing a warning in advance of the summit, also reiterated Russian objections to an anti-missile system proposed by the United States. He indicated that it had to be scrapped for the two countries to make any progress on arms control.
Negotiators for the United States and Russia have met several times already to hammer out a successor to the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or START, which expires Dec. 5.
Medvedev said the number of deployed nuclear warheads should be well below those in an interim agreement signed in 2002 by President George W. Bush and Vladimir V. Putin, Russia’s president at the time and its current prime minister.
That arrangement requires each country to cut its arsenal to fewer than 2,200 deployed warheads by 2012. Officials said they expected any new agreement to push that figure to 1,500 apiece or fewer.
Later yesterday, the Kremlin released a statement from Medvedev that emphasized that Russia would not move forward if the United States did not cancel its plan for an anti-missile system based in Poland and the Czech Republic.
“The reductions that we are offering are possible only if the United States addresses Russian concerns,’’ he said.
