Global General

Moscow may ratify new START next month: lawmaker

(Xinhua)
Updated: 2010-04-26 21:44

MOSCOW - The Russian parliament may ratify the new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) by mid-May, said a senior Russian lawmaker on Monday.

"I suppose that our parliament will ratify this document in the first half of May," said Mikhail Margelov, Chairman of the International Affairs Committee of the Federation Council, or the upper house of the Russian parliament.

Margelov said simultaneous ratification of the new START, which was signed by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and his US counterpart Barack Obama in the Czech capital of Prague on April 8, was currently being worked on by a working group of the Federation Council and the US Senate.

Margelov said he had visited Washington for several meetings of the working group, which primarily focused on simultaneous ratification.

"We met with a dozen Senators, representatives of the Department of State, the Pentagon and Barack Obama's administration," the Interfax news agency quoted him as saying.

Under the new START treaty, the warheads held by the two nuclear superpowers will be reduced to 1,500, about 30 percent lower than the previous treaty's limitation. Strategic offensive weapons will be based solely on the national territories of Russia and the United States.

The widely hailed new pact is conducive to easing frustrated US-Russian ties and pushing forward nuclear disarmament and the non-proliferation process on a global scale.