SOCHI, June 23. /TASS/. Potential future arms control accords with the United States can be drawn up in the form of parallel unilateral restrictions, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov said on Friday.
"We need to think about how to formalize potential future accords and in this regard patterns can be used that we did not know about before, including parallel unilateral restrictions, and, strictly speaking, this is what is already taking place," the senior Russian diplomat said.
"We will need a thorough understanding of the methodology of arms control, including the aspect related to the formalization of possible general agreements," he went on to say.
The deputy foreign minister also pointed out that the US Senate, for its own internal reasons, "refuses to ratify any international documents," which are not predicated on Washington's imposing unilateral and fully consistent approaches on other countries.
"As long as we are talking about agreements in an area that involves the strictest balance of interests with no unilateral concessions on our side, the chances of ratification of these kind of strategic documents in the US Senate, regardless of their composition, are close to zero, the way I see it," Ryabkov summed up.
On February 21, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that Russia was suspending its participation in the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) but was not withdrawing from it. The president stressed that before returning to the discussion of the extension of the New START treaty, the Russian side wants to understand how the treaty will take into account not only the United States’ arsenals but also the stockpiles of other NATO nuclear powers, namely the United Kingdom and France. On March 1, Putin signed a law to suspend Russia’s participation in the treaty.