Russia ready to reduce nuclear arms

Russia is ready to significantly reduce its nuclear arms, President Dmitry Medvedev said yesterday ahead of scheduled talks on the topic with US President Barack Obama.

"We are ready to reduce the number of our strategic defence arms by several times compared to Start," Medvedev told journalists in Amsterdam, referring to the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty Russia is re-negotiating with the US.

Medvedev was speaking through an interpreter after meeting Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende on the last of a two-day official visit.

Russia and the US are set to hold their third round of talks in Geneva next week on finding a successor to Start before it expires in December.

The effort to replace the 1991 treaty is a central element of Obama's plan to "reset" badly strained ties with Russia.

Productive negotiations could boost Obama's vision of a nuclear-free world and help set the stage for his state visit to Moscow in early July.

But one huge stumbling block in disarmament talks remains a US plan - protested by Moscow - to deploy missile defence facilities in eastern Europe.

In separate comments on Friday released by the Kremlin to Russian news agencies, Medvedev said Russia would only cut warheads if the United States addressed its "concerns" on missile defence.

"We cannot agree with the US plans to deploy a global missile defence system. I want to underline that our proposals to cut (nuclear warheads) are only possible if the United States meets Russia's concerns," Medvedev was quoted as saying.

"In every case, the issue of the connection between strategic offensive and defensive weapons must be definitely fixed in any agreement," he added.

Moscow has consistently demanded that a final agreement must encompass the missile defence issue, but Medvedev's declaration on Friday was the first time he has linked disarmament negotiations to the issue.

However, the statement released by the Kremlin in Moscow was surprisingly harsher in tone than comments by Medvedev at a press conference held simultaneously in Amsterdam.

Medvedev told the news briefing he was looking forward "very optimistically" to meeting with Obama and was hopeful the talks would lead to a revival of ties which "in previous years corroded quite a bit".

"We want a verifiable and real reduction of (nuclear) arms.... We want new, binding agreements," Medvedev stressed.

He called for the number of warheads to be "lower than in the Moscow Treaty," referring to the last major disarmament deal between Moscow and Washington in 2002, which set a ceiling of 1,700 to 2,200 deployed warheads on each side.