MUNICH, Germany (AP) - The United States and Russia should set aside Cold War arms control treaties and replace them with new, multilateral agreements to combat nuclear proliferation, a senior Russian official said Sunday. Sergei Ivanov, Russia's defense minister until promoted to first deputy prime minister last year, said the time has come "to open this framework for all leading states interested in cooperation in order to ensure overall security." But "Russia-U.S. ties will certainly retain their significance," he said.Ivanov also told a gathering of the world's top defense officials that Russia's burgeoning economic power does not represent a threat to other countries, but the West has to get used to Moscow's growing influence in world affairs. He said Russia expects to be among the world's five biggest economies by 2020, but "we do not aim to buy the entire Old World with our petrodollars."
"Getting richer, Russia will not pose a threat to the security of other countries. Yet our influence on global processes will continue to grow," he said. "More than half of Russian foreign trade is with the EU, so the Russians have already come - not with tanks, not with missiles, but with joint trade."
| It's trade between unequals: Russia ships natural gas and oil to the West in exchange for technology and food. Average Russians aren't benefitting much from the trade, but that's okay with Vlad. He wants to put Russia back in the middle of world affairs. |
Though Moscow and Washington have been at odds recently over an American plan to position parts of a missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic, Ivanov said Russia and the U.S. needed to work closely together to combat nuclear proliferation. He suggested that old bilateral treaties between the U.S. and Russia on nuclear arms - like the Salt 1 agreement - should be replaced by multilateral agreements.
"It is imperative to ensure that the provisions of such a regime should be legally binding so that, in due course, it would really become possible to shift to the control over nuclear weapons and the process of their gradual reduction on a multilateral basis," he said. Involvement of all major nuclear nations, he said, "is the essence of our proposals related to the anti-missile defense and to the intermediate and short-range missiles."