The delegations of the USA and Russia are planning a meeting in the coming weeks to discuss the renewal of inspections of nuclear weapons facilities in accordance with the new treaty on strategic offensive weapons. This issue was frozen after the start of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine.
According to Bloomberg, State Department representative Ned Price confirmed that the bilateral advisory commission will meet in the near future. He did not provide details, but sources say that the U.S. will raise the issue of inspections at the meeting.
A possible meeting place is called Cairo, but tentative dates are still being agreed upon.
- The current Treaty on the Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Weapons was signed between Russia and the United States in 2010. This is already the third agreement between the two states — the largest owners of nuclear weapons, and it will be valid until 2026. The United States signed the first such agreement with the USSR in the summer of 1991, and the second with Russia in 1993. The agreements provide that Russia and the United States will jointly reduce their nuclear warheads, as well as the possible carriers of nuclear weapons, from missiles to strategic bombers.
- The main means of monitoring these contracts are bilateral inspections. That is, the representatives of Russia and the USA have the right to visit each otherʼs nuclear facilities and personally check whether each country is really reducing its nuclear weapons.
- The bilateral consultative commission, which deals with practical issues of the implementation of the Treaty on the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), last met in Geneva in October 2021. In the summer of this year, the Russian side did not allow the American delegation to its nuclear missiles.