Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and his US counterpart Barack Obama will next week make a joint declaration on their weapons arsenals, in a step towards renewing a key Cold War disarmament pact, a Kremlin advisor said Saturday.
Amid hopes of a warming in relations that have seen their worst cooling since the fall of communism, the two leaders are to hold their first meeting on the sidelines of the G20 meeting in London on April 2.
"We will end up with two presidential declarations -- a general one about Russian-American relations and one about strategic offensive arms," Medvedev's foreign policy advisor Sergei Prikhodko said.
"The texts are turning out well and should be starting point for drawing up future work," he said, according to Russian news agencies.
He said he hoped Medvedev and Obama would then make initial agreements on a renewal of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), a Cold War nuclear disarmament pact that expires in December, at a subsequent meeting after the G20.
The two sides would work "so that already at the next summit meeting the first concrete agreements can be made and the work can be completed by the end of the year."
Talks on renewing START, which led to huge reductions of the US and Russian nuclear arsenals after its signing in 1991, stalled under the previous administration of former US president George W. Bush.
But officials in the Obama administration have indicated that renegotiating the treaty is a priority.
The Obama administration has coined the phrase "press the reset button" to describe aims for Russia policy, a slogan that has also been happily repeated in Moscow.
According to Prikhodko, the London meeting would also see the two leaders agree a date for their next encounter.
Relations between Russia and the United States have been frayed by Moscow's war with Georgia last year and also the Bush administration's plans to place missile defence facilities in Central Europe.
Moscow has said the plans to build a radar base in the Czech Republic and install interceptor missiles in Poland were directed against Russia. But Washington insisted it was aimed at countering threats from Iran.
The eastern expansion of Western military alliance NATO to include former Warsaw Pact states has also been a bone of contention.
Russia is hoping that Obama will drop the missile defence plans and Prikhodko said that Medvedev would remind the US president of Moscow's concern that its own security is affected by the plan.
"The issue is far from being closed," he said.
The deputy head of the Russian general staff, Anatoly Nogovitsyn, told the Moscow Echo radio that the United States had behaved in an "ungentlemanly manner" with its Central European allies as the missile shield would make them the target for foreign espionage.
Obama this week confirmed he wanted to "reset" US relations with Russia but argued NATO should still be open to countries which aspire to join the alliance.
"We have a new chance, which must not be wasted," said Prikhodko. "We believe that London will be an important landmark along that road."
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