Moscow - SANA
The Russian Foreign Ministry described the US statements about reaching a preliminary agreement with Moscow to extend the "START 3" treaty to limit nuclear weapons as "nonsense and a falsification of facts."
Russia Today reported that the Russian Foreign Ministry’s comment came in response to the statements of Marshall Billingsley, the US President’s Special Envoy, who confirmed that the United States and Russia had reached a preliminary agreement to extend the START 3 treaty to reduce nuclear warheads between the two countries.
"We believe that there is an agreement in principle at the highest levels between the governments of the two countries," Billingsley said during an online discussion at the Heritage Foundation.
The Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov indicated last Saturday that "Russia does not rule out that a framework agreement is first reached with the United States that allows us to talk about defining trends and main criteria for further work."
He said, "I confirm that we have not come close to reaching such an agreement with the United States, although we simply do not rule it out either. As for the Americans' attempts to suggest that we are on the threshold of such an agreement, but rather we have come close to it, and I do not see a basis for it."
Ryabkov stressed that the talks that took place in Helsinki with the US Special Representative for Arms Control Affairs Marshall Billingsley on the fifth of this month showed that there are "major differences between the two countries, including the basic elements of such an agreement and the freezing of the two nuclear arsenals."
The 2010 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty puts a limit on the strategic nuclear warheads of the two countries at 1550 each, which is much less than the thousands of nuclear warheads that the two countries possess.
