MOSCOW, December 8. /TASS/. The United States says that it is ready to settle with its allies logistics issues for Russian inspections of nuclear facilities, but such agreements should be ‘committed to paper," Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov said in an interview with the Izvestia daily, which came out on Thursday.
"As for the regimes of inspections, various signals came from the United States. They hinted that they would agree with their allies, who have closed their airspace for our flights. They sent other signals hinting that everything will be regulated," he said. "But is should be operating like clock-work. It should be committed to paper, recorder in a document, the more so as there are a lot of other topics along with the problem of flights," he noted, adding that in the process of preparations for the postponed session of the bilateral consultative commission, the Americans reduced everything to the topic of inspections.
"The resumption of inspections is the only thing, as we could see, they agreed to meet for. It won’t do," he stressed. In his words, it is necessary to find a balance of interests on the issues of inspections. "It is inadmissible to focus on the issue when American inspectors can go to Russia, as the Americans do. It is America’s typical ultra-utilitarian approach when they insist on having only what they want. It doesn’t work this way," he said.
Moscow, in his words, has an absolutely different list priorities. "Among other things, it includes a very serious problem when several dozens of strategic delivery weapons belonging to the US have been unilaterally exempt from the treaty after the United States declared that they had been reequipped from nuclear to non-nuclear," he explained.
He noted that such reequipment is possible under the treaty, but the other side must have a possibility to see for itself that this reequipment did take place and that these delivery weapons cannot be swiftly reequipped back. "We had no possibility to finish this work, so, we don’t recognize the legitimacy of the unilateral exemption of these delivery weapons from the treaty’s arithmetic," Ryabkov said.