The president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, has proposed to extend the current Treaty for the Reduction of Strategic Arms (START) for a year without conditions to be able to address the negotiations on said agreement during that period, as reported by the Russian news agency Sptunik.
“I have a proposal that consists of prolonging the current treaty without conditions for at least one year in order to be able to hold substantive negotiations on all aspects of the problems that are managed with such agreements,” the Russian president said.
Putin has addressed the extension of the START treaty and the situation in the Nagorno Karabakh region – whose sovereignty Armenia and Azerbaijan have disputed for decades – in a meeting with members of the National Security Council.
“The Russian-American dialogue on the START Treaty was discussed at the meeting. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov provided information in this regard,” explained the spokesman for the Russian Presidency, Dimitri Peskov.
Putin, the Russian Prime Minister, Mikhail Mishustin, the president of the Federation Council, Valentina Matvienko, and the vice president of the Security Council, Dimitri Medvedev, among other senior officials, participated in the virtual meeting.
The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) was signed in 1991 by the leaders of the United States and the Soviet Union. In April 2010 the agreement was replaced by the New START treaty, signed by the then presidents of the United States and Russia, Barack Obama and Dimitri Medvedev.
The current version of the New START treaty, which entered into force on February 5, 2011 and expires in February 2021, establishes a series of limitations for Russia and the United States in the deployment of strategic offensive weapons.
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