MOSCOW, November 11. /TASS/. The settlement of the inspections issue within the framework of the New START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) is complicated and hardly possible within the few days of bilateral consultations, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov told reporters on Friday.
"The problem of the resumption of inspections, taking into account the nature of obstacles created recently by the American side <...> to the normal interaction of officials on different lines, of course, is complicated. This is not a problem of today or yesterday, and it is unlikely to be resolved within a few days, even in a specialized format," he said in reply to a question from TASS.
Ryabkov added that "strangely", in the media the resumption of the bilateral consultative commission turned out to be linked to the situation around inspections. "I will not deny that the topic of inspections will be a subject of discussion at the event, but it is by no means the only and certainly not the main issue. We have accumulated a lot of questions over time, which must be considered with the Americans," the senior diplomat explained.
Among the other important issues to be discussed Ryabkov singled out the problem of the artificial withdrawal of some strategic carriers announced by the Americans as having been re-equipped for non-nuclear missions. "We cannot confirm this, and because of this there is a situation where the Americans de facto have at their disposal a significant number of strategic carriers, namely heavy bombers and submarine-launched ballistic missile launchers, which at least do not fit into the requirements of the treaty. And that's a problem. There are many other, more technical questions," he said.
Earlier, Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs Bonnie Jenkins said that officials from Russia and the US were coordinating a meeting to discuss the possibility of resuming inspection activities under the treaty. As Russian envoy to the US Anatoly Antonov explained in his interview with TASS, various restrictive measures by Washington and its allies against Moscow have created conditions in which Russia's inspections in the US under the New START Treaty are essentially blocked.