Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said yesterday that the presidents of Russia and the US were unlikely to sign a new treaty to curb their nuclear arsenals when they meet in Copenhagen this week.
Lavrov also complained that US negotiators had slowed down the pace of work in the past two days in Geneva, hampering efforts to finalize a replacement to the a successor to the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START).
“This is unlikely to happen in Copenhagen,” Lavrov said. “We still have a big workload — of a purely technical character — facing us.”
Both US President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev are expected to be in the Danish capital this week to attend the climate change summit, providing a potential opportunity for the leaders to sign the new Treaty.
“In the last couple of days we have noticed some slowing down in the position of US negotiators in Geneva. They explain this by the need to receive additional instructions. But our team is ready for work,” Lavrov said.
“I believe that if Russian and US negotiators concentrate on implementing these remaining orders from the presidents, we will reach agreement within a pretty brief period,” he said.
START, the biggest agreed nuclear weapons cut in history, was due to lapse on Dec. 5, but both sides agreed it should remain in force pending agreement on a successor.
Signing of the agreement would provide further signals that previously tense relations between the US and Russia were easing.
The START-1 treaty, signed by former US president George H.W. Bush and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, took nearly a decade to achieve.
Under the deal, Russia more than halved its nuclear arsenal, the Foreign Ministry has said.
Over the past decade, relations between Moscow and Washington became strained over the Iraq War, NATO’s eastward expansion and last year’s Georgia war, but Obama pledged to improve ties when he became president.
Last July, Obama and Medvedev outlined a framework for the new treaty, restricting deployed strategic warheads to between 1,500 and 1,675, while limiting the number of delivery platforms to between 500 and 1,100.
The US and Russia would still have enough firepower to destroy the world several times over.
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
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Armed with 4,000 eggs and a truckload of sugar and cream, French pastry chefs on Wednesday completed a 121.8m-long strawberry cake that they have claimed is the world’s longest ever made. Youssef El Gatou brought together 20 chefs to make the 1.2 tonne masterpiece that took a week to complete and was set out on tables in an ice rink in the Paris suburb town of Argenteuil for residents to inspect. The effort overtook a 100.48m-long strawberry cake made in the Italian town of San Mauro Torinese in 2019. El Gatou’s cake also used 350kg of strawberries, 150kg of sugar and 415kg of
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