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US seeks to narrow agenda of talks with Russia on strategic stability, says top diplomat

There is no clarity on the agenda of the Russia-US summit yet, according to the Russian foreign minister

© Russian Foreign Ministry/TASS

BAKU, May 11. /TASS/. The United States seeks to narrow the agenda of talks with Russia on strategic stability, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said after negotiations with his Azerbaijani counterpart Jeyhun Bayramov on Tuesday.

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"We propose the areas of strategic stability be considered by taking into account all factors without any exception, all systems without any exception both offensive and defensive that directly influence this strategic stability. We handed over our proposals back in the final year of the Trump administration and reconfirmed them with the change of power in the White House," the Russian foreign minister pointed out.

"We are waiting for a response, although the first signs suggest that the Americans would like to narrow down the agenda of discussions on strategic stability considerably and include far from all the factors that materially influence the present state of things in this sphere into the negotiating framework," Lavrov pointed out.

Moscow has welcomed Washington’s idea of holding a bilateral summit. The Russian side believes that strategic stability issues must be among the main subjects for both presidents to discuss, Russia’s top diplomat noted.

"We indicated that it was expedient for our American colleagues to make up their mind on the agenda. In our understanding, the issues that I have mentioned should top the agenda. Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly emphasized that Russia and the United States bear responsibility for the state of affairs in the world as the two leading nuclear powers and so a dialogue is certainly necessary, especially in a situation when, in fact, Washington has consistently wrecked all the mechanisms of arms control and only the New START Treaty [on Measures for the Further Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms] has remained," Lavrov said.

There is no clarity on the agenda of the Russia-US summit yet, he said.

"We would also like to understand how [our] American colleagues are going to act. We asked them this question and we have received no answer, considering the sequence of steps. They said at first that the presidents should meet without any preparations and map out priority areas of our further work and then they mentioned that, perhaps, it would be better for experts to hold a meeting before the summit. In general, there are a lot of unclear things and while we positively view this initiative as a whole, we are studying all the related aspects," Russia’s top diplomat said.

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The 12th International Meeting of High Representatives for Security Issues took place in St. Petersburg on April 23-25