... negotiation style that worked with Mikhail Gorbachev thirty years ago will not work with today’s Russian president, especially since the level of trust between Russia and the West is critically low at the moment.
Be an Honest Broker
No one can deprive France of its right to voice concerns about Russia’s compliance or noncompliance with the INF Treaty. For one thing, Russia can be accused of not paying enough attention to the doubts and concerns raised in Washington and many European capitals. Yet it would only be fair if Paris also paid more attention to the concerns and suspicions of the ...
Director General of the Russian International Affairs Council Andrey Kortunov on the Future of Nuclear Arms Control
Andrey Kortunov:
The Domino Effect: America’s Withdrawal from the INF Treaty and Its Ramifications
Few of us remember how negotiations on the Iranian nuclear programme began. In October 2003, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs of France Dominique de Villepin and Federal Minister for Foreign Affairs of Germany Joschka Fischer approached President of Iran ...
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The INF Treaty is falling apart at the seams, creating threats to all the arms control regimes in their current form. The crisis could either bury the very principle of arms control or create an environment for a new strategic stability architecture.
France and the United Kingdom are obviously concerned about the possibility of becoming targets for Russia’s restored non-strategic missiles. In the worst-case scenario, if the INF Treaty is cancelled altogether, the current cooperation on the SCALP/Storm Shadow cruise missile could result in the development of new long-range land-based cruise missiles in response to Russia’s efforts, but this is an undesirable scenario. At ...
... issues were touched upon in the course of the meeting: various aspects of Syrian Settlement, results of the quadripartite Russia-Turkey-France-Germany summit meeting in Istanbul, options for Syrian political transit, possible areas of cooperation between Russia and France in Syria and in the Middle East.
The meeting also focused on the military-political consequences of the likely withdrawal of the United States from the INF Treaty, ways to overcome the current arms control crisis and to restore a single and indivisible European security system. The meeting was attended by the staff of the French Embassy in Moscow.
