"The session is resuming," said a spokesman for the US mission, adding that the talks on the renewal of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) which expires on December 5, will be hosted in turn by the United States and Russia.

A Russian diplomat added that the first day of the latest round of negotiations is taking place at the US mission, and that the talks should last two weeks in all.

Washington and Moscow agreed earlier this year to reach a new nuclear deal to succeed START, marking the first tangible step in the thaw in US-Russian relations heralded by President Barack Obama's administration.

START, signed in 1991 just before the break-up of the Soviet Union, bound both sides to deep cuts in their nuclear arsenals.

Negotiations have been dogged by bargaining over the deployment of the US missile defence shield in ex-Soviet states in eastern Europe, a project that has angered Russia.

But Obama announced in September that he would shelve plans to site parts of a missile defence shield in Poland and the Czech Republic, and instead deploy more mobile equipment targeting Iran's short and medium-range missiles.

Last Tuesday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov indicated that START negotiations were heading in a positive direction.

"We have made substantial movement forward," Lavrov said at a joint press conference in Moscow with visiting US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

On October 9, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev also assessed that the chances of Moscow and Washington reaching a deal on a new nuclear disarmament treaty by a December deadline are "not bad."

At a Moscow summit in July, Medvedev and Obama agreed to reduce the number of nuclear warheads in Russian and US strategic arsenals to between 1,500 and 1,675 within seven years.

They also agreed to cut the number of ballistic missile carriers to between 500 and 1,100.