Russia Won’t Renew Pact on Weapons With U.S. [View all]

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Source: New York Times

The Russian government said Wednesday that it would not renew a hugely successful 20-year partnership with the United States to safeguard and dismantle nuclear and chemical weapons in the former Soviet Union when the program expires next spring, a potentially grave setback in the already fraying relationship between the former cold war enemies.

The Kremlin’s refusal to renew the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program would put an end to a multibillion-dollar effort, financed largely by American taxpayers, that is widely credited with removing all nuclear weapons from the former Soviet republics of Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus; deactivating more than 7,600 strategic nuclear warheads; and eliminating huge stockpiles of nuclear missiles and chemical weapons, as well as launchers and other equipment and military sites that supported unconventional weapons.

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In a statement on its Web site, the Russian Foreign Ministry said that the Obama administration had proposed renewing the arrangement but that Washington was well aware of Russia’s opposition. “American partners know that their proposal is not consistent with our ideas about what forms and on what basis further cooperation should be built,” the statement said.

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Mr. Lugar, who is leaving the Senate at the end of this year, visited Moscow in August to begin pressing for renewal of the program and found Russian officials resistant. “The Russian government indicated a desire to make changes to the Nunn-Lugar Umbrella Agreement as opposed to simply extending it,” he said Wednesday. “At no time did officials indicate that, at this stage of negotiation, they were intent on ending it, only amending it.”

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Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/11/world/europe/russia-wont-renew-pact-with-us-on-weapons.html?_r=0