New START treaty gets preliminary OK in Russia parliament

Reporting from Moscow — After just a few hours of debate, the lower house of Russia’s parliament on Friday gave overwhelming preliminary approval to the New START nuclear arms treaty with the United States. The vote set the stage for the pact’s likely easy approval in the new year.

In a 350-58 vote, lawmakers in the State Duma approved the treaty on its first reading. Two more votes in the lower house, on the second and third readings, and balloting in the upper house were put off until January.

However, experts said legislators of both houses are expected to fall in line with the Kremlin, which has given strong support to a treaty designed to sharply reduce the number of nuclear warheads and launchers in Russia and the United States.

“Today’s ratification in the State Duma marks the completion of a most important achievement in the entire history of the U.S.-Russian recent reset in the relations,” said Andrei Kortunov, president of the New Eurasia Foundation, a Moscow-based think tank. “This success is hard to overestimate from the point of view of the real disarmament process, and today we can say that the skeptics of the reset were proved wrong.”

Ratification of New START would clear the way for improving relations between the two nations in political, economic and security areas, Kortunov said.

The treaty calls for reducing the maximum number of deployed long-range nuclear warheads in each country to 1,550 from 2,200 within seven years of ratification. It also limits the number of nuclear weapon launchers to 700.

New START won approval Wednesday in the U.S. Senate after a number of Republicans broke ranks with their party and backed the accord. The 71-26 vote gave a major foreign policy victory to President Obama.

On Friday, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev praised Obama’s efforts in “pushing through the ratification of a most important document, the START [treaty] on which our security will be based in the nearest years.”

“In general I would like to say that it is easy for me to work with President Obama,” Medvedev said in televised remarks. “He is a man who can listen and hear, a man not imprisoned by some stereotypes, a man who, in principle, and that may be the main thing, meets this requirement: He delivers on his promise, be it the START … or the ratification of a very important agreement on nuclear cooperation or work on international issues.”

Three readings for the ratification are needed for the legislators to get acquainted in detail with the U.S. Senate resolution on the treaty, a State Duma official explained.

“We need to carefully study the 13-page resolution which the Senate passed along with the approval of the treaty,” said Andrei Klimov, deputy head of the lower house’s international affairs committee. “If they wrote something in the resolution which would require an adequate response, such response will be given at later readings.”

The lower house’s Communists and nationalist Liberal Democrats opposed ratification, saying the treaty’s provisions would weaken national security.

“We think this treaty means a strategic defeat for Russia as it in no measure limits the development of the U.S. antiballistic defense,” said Leonid Kalashnikov, a Communist legislator and first deputy head of the international affairs committee. “The treaty also doesn’t take into account the nuclear arsenals of the U.S. NATO partners, which leaves us with a 30% inferiority in the number of warheads.”

But others expressed satisfaction with Friday’s vote.

“There are people in the United States who think that they had won the Cold War and they don’t need any treaties with us, but the Senate vote showed that fortunately such people are in a minority,” said Sergei Markov, a lower house legislator. “The treaty we ratified in a joint effort will help us to lift the remaining tensions and work together for the future.”

sergei.loiko@latimes.com