MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 22nd June, 2020) Senior Russian and US diplomats will face off in a fresh round of crucial nuclear talks in Vienna on Monday in the effort to rescue their last major arms control treaty.
The delegations will be led by the Russian deputy foreign minister in charge of non-proliferation, Sergey Ryabkov, and the special US presidential envoy for arms control, Marshall Billingslea.
China has declined the invitation to join, dashing Washington's hopes of trilaterizing the New START treaty, which has halved US and Russian nuclear arms stockpiles.
Washington has repeatedly said it wants the successor to the decade-old pact to include Beijing, which has only a fraction of arsenals wielded by the US and Russia. Moscow is pushing for the existing deal to be extended by five years past its expiry date in February.
Ryabkov said this month that Russia will not insist on China's involvement and suggested bringing the United Kingdom and France, US allies and small-time nuclear powers, to the negotiating table.
Russia and the US are each estimated to have slightly over 6,000 warheads, while China has 290, France 300 and the UK 200, according to 2019 figures published by the DC-based Arms Control Association.
New START is the last major arms control agreement between the two rivals. US President Donald Trump has pulled his country out of several landmark international accords, including the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty.
Last month, Washington announced it would walk out of the Open Skies treaty that allows participating countries, including Russia, to conduct unarmed aerial surveillance over its territory, citing Moscow's violations. Russia denied the claim.
Experts have warned that China's absence from nuclear talks may prove to be a deal-breaker. John Carlson, a member of the Asia-Pacific Leadership Network for Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament, said the US could use it to justify its refusal to talk.
"The ball is in the US court. If the US doesn't get anything from China, that's a convenient excuse to walk away. Hopefully, the US will realize that letting New START lapse is not in its interest," he said.
The deal's other "fatal flaw" in the eyes of the Trump administration is that it does not include Russian non-strategic nuclear weapons, according to Joshua Pollack, a senior research associate at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey, California.
"Either issue alone would be sufficient to prevent progress. Having two such objections will be helpful just in case there is a surprise concession on one of them," Pollack suggested.
Nikolai Sokov, a senior fellow at the Vienna Center for Disarmament and Nonproliferation, told Sputnik that the US had demanded that Russia shut its R&D programs, including the one that created a maneuvering hypersonic warhead, Avangard, something that Moscow will never agree to.
Hopes are that Russia and the US will negotiate a limited extension to buy time for a follow-on pact, thus averting a new arms race at a time when the world is struggling to keep a lid on the pandemic, according to Gotz Neuneck, deputy director of the University of Hamburg's Institute of Peace Research and Security.
And, ultimately, there is still a possibility that the November election will put a Democrat president in the White House who will not let New START suffer the fate of the INF, Thomas Shea, an adjunct senior fellow at the Federation of American Scientists, said.
"If Joe Biden is elected in November, we should expect that his administration would seek to build on past agreements to secure a foundation for a more durable peace," the academic predicted.