US President Joe Biden on Tuesday signaled a tougher US stance on Moscow in his first telephone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin, raising concerns over human rights and “aggression” against Ukraine, but welcoming cooperation on a new nuclear weapons accord.
The call was initiated by the White House to discuss progress on extending the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) deal, which limits the two powers to a maximum of 1,550 deployed nuclear warheads each and expires on Friday next week. An agreement now appears to be close.
However, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said that Biden also raised a raft of worries about the Russian authorities’ treatment of opposition members, including the “poisoning of Alexei Navalny.”
The Kremlin critic and anti-corruption crusader nearly died last year from a poisoning he says that he has proved was carried out by the Russian security services, something Putin denies.
Navalny is imprisoned in Moscow and over the weekend, police made mass arrests of people demonstrating in his support across the country.
Navalny’s aides called for new anti-government rallies in Moscow this weekend.
Showing Moscow and Washington are still able to cooperate separately on nuclear issues, the White House said that Biden and Putin had agreed to “work urgently” to wrap up negotiations on a fresh five-year period for the New START treaty ahead of its expiry.
In Washington, a US Department of State official, who asked not to be identified, said that the two sides had “reached agreement ... to proceed quickly to conclude such an agreement by February 5th.”
The Russian parliament’s lower house yesterday unanimously voted to ratify an agreement to extend the New START deal by five years.
The upper house was expected to consider the ratification of the treaty extension later yesterday.
Meanwhile, Biden also brought up “our strong support for Ukraine’s sovereignty in the face of Russia’s ongoing aggression,” Psaki said.
She also enumerated a long sequence of other “matters of concern” causing friction in Washington.
These included the unprecedented mass hacking of US computers that has been widely blamed on Russia, interference in last year’s US presidential election and reports that Moscow offered bounties for the killing of US soldiers in Afghanistan.
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