Moscow and Washington can see a marked improvement in mutual ties as past mistrust is swept aside, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in an article published yesterday, pledging renewed efforts for a new nuclear arms reduction deal.
“The key to new ties between our countries is reconstruction of trust undermined in past years, and it will require joint efforts in overcoming negative legacies ... Interaction, compromise, give-and-take is important here,” Lavrov wrote in the Rossiyskaya Gazeta daily.
“We will honestly strive for a timely and full-fledged replacement of the START [Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty] treaty, which would provide strategic security on the basis of admission that strategic aggressive and defensive weapons are irreversibly linked,” Lavrov wrote.
“We know that it will require overcoming the resistance of certain forces within the United States which cannot, by inertia, imagine an equal partnership with Russia,” the minister warned.
Earlier, Lavrov said that efforts to clinch a new Russian-US nuclear disarmament deal this year have advanced and negotiators will report to the two countries’ leaders by the time Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and US President Barack Obama meet at a G20 summit this month.
During Obama’s landmark visit to Moscow in July, he and Medvedev agreed to hammer out a new nuclear arms reduction pact to replace the 1991 START, preferably by the time it expires on Dec. 5.
A declaration signed by Medvedev and Obama at their Moscow meeting fixed no deadline for agreement on a new deal and only instructed negotiators to complete the work as quickly as possible.
“The crisis of trust in our relations with the West as a whole lay in the conflict of expectations as there was no common understanding of what the end of the Cold War stood for. That is where all the misunderstanding came from,” Lavrov said.
However, as “we are wiser now” the anti-US sentiments in Russia also would give way, as “once the reasons for such an attitude vanish, so shall Russian feelings toward America change, and they already do,” Lavrov said.
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
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Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia
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