“Nezavisimaya Gazeta”: “Geneva Negotiations Stumble upon Telemetry”
Moscow and Washington split on relationship between START and missile defence systems.
The Russian Foreign Ministry said yesterday that Moscow and Washington were maintaining their negotiations on offensive weapons reduction, but did not specify when the two delegations would meet again. Experts believe that the main problem was a disagreement as to whether the new treaty should refer to offensive and defensive weapons as linked, meaning an interconnection between START and missile defence.
A wave of speculations on possible new phases in the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty was set off by the statements of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin made before the New Year. He told journalists in Vladivostok that the Russian-American talks on START were "going on smoothly" and hoped that mutual rules would be elaborated in the course of the talks. "I think we do need certain generally accepted arms reduction rules, which would be interpreted in the same way by both sides and be easily verifiable and transparent. Having such rules is certainly better than not having any," he said.
What is at stake here is the balance between strategic offensive and defensive weapons. Vladimir Putin said that Russia was not developing a missile defence system and would pay more attention to offensive weapons. "In order to maintain the balance without developing a missile defence system, like the United States, we should develop offensive strike systems," the Prime Minister said.
He added that Russia was ready to give the U.S. information about its offensive weapons but only in exchange for information about the missile defence systems being developed. "If we want to exchange information, then our partners should give us information about their ballistic missile defence system, and in turn, we would give them information about our offensive weapons," Vladimir Putin said stressing that both systems were crucial for the balance of power.
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov made certain clarifications on the issue. He said that Russia could possibly agree to stop encrypting the telemetry data for strategic missile test launches, as the arms reduction treaty stipulates, if the U.S. gave Russia access to the missile defence system's telemetry. The U.S. Department of State said that it was strongly opposed to linking START with missile defence, insisting that the topics were not interrelated.
Commenting on Russia's stance, and particularly Vladimir Putin's statements in Vladivostok, Ariel Cohen of The New York Times, an expert for the Heritage Foundation, said that when START-1 expired, the two countries ended up in "unchartered waters." "Vladimir Putin upped the ante, linking U.S. missile defence with the treaty signature," which, as the expert believes, was absolutely unacceptable for the U.S.
Retired major-general and candidate of military sciences Vladimir Belous commented to Nezavisimaya Gazeta that diplomats should not have claimed that the main issues of Russian-American negotiations had been resolved with only some minor details left open for discussion. "The details are usually the stumbling block," the expert said. He believes that the question of linking offensive and defensive weapons together is one of the key issues now, despite a long history going back to Ronald Reagan's Star Wars programme.
The expert stresses that the talks will succeed if the parties can reach a compromise that will take proper account of Moscow's concern with American missile defence.
Igor Lyakin-Frolov, deputy head of the Foreign Ministry's information and press department, told Nezavisimaya Gazeta that negotiations between Moscow and Washington "went on uninterruptedly." He added that Russian and American diplomats "were maintaining contacts and exchanging their opinions in order to reach agreements that the two countries' presidents had previously accorded." However, he could not say when the delegations would meet again.
By Artur Blinov
