Russia welcomes US President Joe Biden's proposal to extend nuclear treaty

The Kremlin on Friday welcomed the stated intention of US President Joe Biden to extend the New START arms control treaty with Russia, but said that Moscow wanted to see concrete proposals from Washington.

The White House said on Thursday that Biden would seek a five-year extension of the arms control treaty that is due to expire in early February, in one of the first major foreign policy decisions of the new administration.

To this end, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said Moscow stands for extending the pact and that it was important to see the detail of the US proposal. The Trump administration had sought to attach conditions to any renewal, something Moscow rejected.

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“We can only welcome political will to extend the document," Peskov said in a conference call with reporters. “But all will depend on the details of the proposal."

The treaty, signed in 2010 by President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, limits each country to no more than 1,550 deployed nuclear warheads. It expires on February 5.

Russia has long proposed to prolong the pact without any conditions or changes, but Trump’s administration waited until last year to start talks and made the extension contingent on a set of demands. The talks stalled, and months of bargaining have failed to narrow differences.

“Certain conditions for the extension have been put forward, and some of them have been absolutely unacceptable for us, so let's see first what the US is offering," Peskov said.

Biden indicated during the campaign that he favoured the preservation of the New START treaty, which was negotiated during his tenure as US vice president.

The talks on the treaty’s extension also were clouded by tensions between Russia and the United States, which have been fuelled by Moscow’s meddling in the 2016 US presidential election and other irritants.

Despite the extension proposal, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Biden remains committed to holding Russia “to account for its reckless and adversarial actions," such as its alleged involvement in the Solar Winds hacking event, 2020 election interference, the chemical poisoning of opposition figure Alexei Navalny and the widely reported allegations that Russia may have offered bounties to the Taliban to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan.

Peskov has, meanwhile, reaffirmed Russia’s denial of involvement in any such activities.