UNITED NATIONS, September 22. /TASS/. The Russian side is committed to the moratorium on nuclear tests and will stick to this position if other countries observe it, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Vershinin said on Friday.

"Russia declared a voluntary moratorium on nuclear tests in the early 1990s and has been committed to it ever since. We will continue to act this way if other nuclear states behave in the same way," he said at the Conference on Facilitating the Entry into Force of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty.

"Voluntary moratoriums on nuclear tests, although very important, cannot compensate the fact that the main task of the treaty’s enforcement has not been resolved," he said. "Unilateral measures cannot be a substitution for international liabilities under the treaty either."

"In conclusion, I would like to reiterate that Russia accepts the final declaration of our conference, including the list of measures to facilitate the treaty’s entry into force. We will do our best to promote their practical implementation," Vershinin stressed.

The Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty was approved by the UN General Assembly on September 24, 1996. It bans nuclear weapons test explosions and any other nuclear explosions, for both civilian and military purposes, in all environments. The treaty has been ratified by 178 countries, including the United Kingdom, France, and Russia. However, it has not come into forces. To come into effect it needs to be ratified by 44 countries, which either possess nuclear weapons or have potential capacities to obtain them (they are listed in the Annex; the list was drawn on the basis of data from the International Atomic Energy Agency). Eight countries from this list are outside the treaty: India, North Korea, and Pakistan had not signed the treaty; Egypt, Israel, Iran, China, and the United States signed but not ratified it.