“Practical” work to extend the New START treaty has started said Maria Zakharova, the Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman, on Monday. The secretary of Russia's National Security Council and the United States' national security advisor to the president discussed extending the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) over a phone call.
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"I can say that experts are working on it. It is practical work and it has already begun," said Zakharova in an interview with the Rossiya-24 television channel.
On Monday, the Secretary of the Security Council of the Russian Federation Nikolai Patrushev had a telephone conversation with the Assistant to the President of the United States for National Security Jacob Sullivan, where they discussed the extension of the New START treaty, as well as the prospects for the development of Russian-American cooperation in the field of security.
According to the Security Council of the Russian Federation, the telephone conversation took place at the initiative of Washington.
The Treaty between the United States of America and the Russian Federation on Measures for the Further Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms (the New START Treaty) was signed by Moscow and Washington in 2010 and entered into force on February 5, 2011.
The treaty stipulates that that seven years after it goes into effect, each party should have no more than a total of 700 deployed intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM), submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBM), and strategic bombers, as well as no more than 1,550 warheads on deployed ICBMs, deployed SLBMs and strategic bombers, and a total of 800 deployed and non-deployed missile launchers.
The document is set to remain in effect until February 5, 2021, unless it is replaced with another agreement on nuclear arms reduction. It can also be extended for no more than five years (until 2026) with the consent of both parties.
Over the past two years, Moscow has repeatedly called on Washington not to delay solving the issue on a possible extension of the treaty, which it has described as "a golden standard" in disarmament. Russian President Vladimir Putin said in an interview with The Financial Times in June 2019 that if this treaty ceased to exist there would be no other tools in the world containing the arms race.
The Trump administration did not show any cooperation on the matter, even when Russia offered a one-year extension as a compromise. Now the situation has changed with the new administration as President Biden is seeking a five-year extension on the only remaining treaty limiting the world’s two largest nuclear arsenals just days before it expires.
