Our Duma Has Yet to Think

Russian deputies will ratify the new START treaty no earlier than the end of January.

Yesterday during the first hearing, the State Duma approved the new START treaty as ratified by the U.S. Senate on Wednesday. However, the Russian deputies, like their American counterparts, who have adopted resolutions supporting the treaty, are also going to make some substantial reservations — the debates will be held in early 2011. Thus, the idea of a contemporaneous ratification of the START treaty, on which Presidents Dmitry Medvedev and Barack Obama agreed, has failed.

“Barack Obama did a really good job.... Under very difficult conditions, he managed to push through the ratification of this most important START treaty. In my opinion, our security for the next few years will be based on this treaty,”* claimed Russian President Dmitry Medvedev yesterday during the live broadcast of Review of the Year with President of Russia. “He is on his Christmas holiday, but I think he can rest with the realization that his duty was done. I said to him yesterday, ‘Barack, take a rest now!’”*

The Russian president talked about his late-night telephone conversation with the U.S. president. Before this conversation, American diplomatic representatives made it clear that Barack Obama was interested in the earliest approval of the START treaty by the Russian Parliament — the more so as the Russian and U.S. presidents repeatedly stressed the importance of the synchronous ratification of the treaty.

However, the State Duma will not quickly pass the START treaty. On Thursday, it was agreed that the debates on the treaty would be held in three hearings. Yesterday, the chairman of the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the State Duma, Konstantin Kosachev, announced that under the best of circumstances the treaty will be ratified by the end of January.

Also yesterday, the first hearing took place in the State Duma, with 350 deputies voting for the approval of the treaty and 58 voting against it. The camp of the opponents of the treaty comprised of the deputies from the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR) and the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF). The position of the CPRF was explained to Kommersant by Leonid Kalashnikov, the first deputy of the head of the Committee on Foreign Affairs. According to his words, the CPRF put in doubt the regulations regarding telemetry, the terms of treaty’s denunciation, the methods of counting the bombers, the potential of conversion and a number of other issues. “The treaty is intended to remove missiles from the platforms and not to destroy them. Thus, the document changes only the methods of counting but does not reduce number of the arms,”* said the deputy. Besides, in his opinion, the treaty “assigns to offensive strategic arms only what is advantageous to the United States and not the weapons being developed by Washington under the initiative of Prompt Global Strike.”*

However, the majority of deputies gave heed to Russia’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergei Lavrov, who arrived in the lower house of the Parliament: “I hope that we will not witness attempts to amend the text of the treaty by the State Duma, and I hope that as deliberately as the U.S. Senate, the deputies will work up their position to the treaty, which certainly should be ratified in an unchanged form.”*

Although they must approve the new START treaty in the form in which it was signed by the presidents of two countries in April, Russian lawmakers still reserve the right to set forth their opinions — as the U.S. Senate did when it adopted its resolution. Sergei Lavrov told them what was confusing about the resolution and what deputies would have to contest.

According to his words, the Senate resolution appeared to be tougher than was anticipated. One of its main items is that the assertion in the preamble of the document about the connection of the START to ABM system has no legal force. Moscow cannot agree with such interpretation. “Any treaty in all its parts is a single entity and reflects a set of agreements, compromise and a balance of interests,” said Mr. Lavrov. In addition, Moscow is confused by the fact that the Senate resolution has an item, according to which new kinds of non-nuclear strategic weapons are not covered by the START treaty. “But in the treaty it is written that the technical features of non-nuclear equipped strategic weapons should be decided by a Bilateral Commission of Russia and the United States,” recalled the head of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. These two issues should be clarified in a declaration, which the Duma will make in January 2011 after voting at the second and third hearings.

Nevertheless, Russian experts do not consider Obama and Medvedev’s plan on the synchronous ratification of the START treaty a failure just because the State Duma will ratify it no sooner than next year. “The only disadvantage in delaying the process is that the mutual control and data exchange will begin later than they otherwise would,”* maintained Vladimir Dvorkin, chief research officer of IMEMO RAN (Institute of World Economy and International Relations of Russian Akademy of Sciences) and a retired major general. He also does not consider the presence of opponents to the treaty in the State Duma to be a drawback. “Probably there are recommendations that we should keep up the balance with the Americans — not only in number of nuclear warheads but also in number of supporters and opponents of the new START treaty,” remarked Dvorkin.

*Editor’s Note: These quotes, though accurately translated, could not be verified.