MOSCOW, February 17. /TASS/. The United States has provided no response to Russia’s proposal to bring back nuclear weapons to its soil and refrain from further deploying them outside its territory, the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement posted on its website on Thursday, outlining Russia’s response to the US reply on security guarantees.
"In its document, the United States did not respond to such an element of the package of our proposed measures as returning nuclear weapons deployed outside its territory to its national soil and refraining from further deploying them outside its national territory, and confined itself to mentioning the need to address the problem of non-strategic nuclear weapons on the platform of a strategic dialogue, without taking into account the specifics of their location and other factors affecting the security of the parties," the document reads.
As the Russian Foreign Ministry also pointed out, the issues of non-strategic nuclear weapons cannot be discussed without resolving the issue of not deploying them in NATO’s non-nuclear member states.
"We would like to make clear that our proposals deal with the need to resolve the problem that US nuclear weapons capable of striking targets on Russian territory are present on the territory of some NATO non-nuclear member states in violation of the Nuclear Weapons Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). This should also embrace eliminating infrastructure for quickly deploying such weapons in Europe and terminating NATO’s practice of conducting training and drills for handling these weapons, in which the NATO non-nuclear member states are involved," the statement says.
"Without removing this irritant, the issues of non-strategic nuclear weapons cannot be discussed," the Russian Foreign Ministry stressed.