Putin hails agreement on nuclear arms cuts reached with U.S.

The Associated PressMOSCOW -- Russian President Vladimir Putin welcomed the agreement reached Monday between U.S. and Russian negotiators on landmark cuts in nuclear weapons that he and President Bush will sign at a summit next week.

"We are satisfied with the joint work," Putin said shortly after he was informed that the agreement was finalized. "Without the interested, active position of the American administration and the attention of President Bush, it would have been difficult to reach such agreements."

Bush announced the deal in Washington on Monday, immediately after talks in Moscow between U.S. Undersecretary of State John Bolton and Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Georgy Mamedov.

"The treaty will liquidate the legacy of the Cold War," Bush said.

The arms control agreement would require each country to cut its nuclear arsenal to 1,700 to 2,200 warheads from the 6,000 now allowed by the START-I treaty. Bush and Putin agreed to those levels last fall, and negotiators have been trying to work out a formal document codifying them in time for the May 23-26 summit.

But some Russian arms control analysts expressed skepticism about the accord.

"Both sides will do what they wanted to do, even without the agreement," said Pavel Podvig, a researcher at the Center for Arms Control in Moscow.

Retired Maj. Gen. Vladimir Dvorkin, a former top arms control negotiator and adviser to the Moscow-based PIR research center, said he was treating the announcement with "cautious optimism."

"The United States has shown how it regards treaties," Dvorkin said, recalling the Bush administration had pulled out of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty to pursue an anti-missile defense shield. That move was harshly criticized in Moscow.

One sticking point had been Russia's objections to U.S. plans for storing some of the nuclear weapons rather than destroying them. Senior administration officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said some of the arms will be stored and others destroyed under the accord.

Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov told reporters that Russia had not dropped its objections to the idea of stockpiling warheads, but did not elaborate.

In a victory for Putin, the president dropped his insistence on an informal agreement and will sign a treaty. That means the deal must be approved by the U.S. Senate, which is controlled by rival Democrats -- a step Bush had hoped to avoid. The Russian parliament largely supports Putin.

Putin had no comment on details of the accord.

Earlier Monday, the Russian Foreign Ministry had issued a statement saying that as a result of Monday's talks "it was possible to bring the sides closer in a cardinal way," without elaborating.

At the start of talks, Mamedov had called them "difficult," saying they were complicated by changes in U.S. nuclear and other military policies in recent months.

"We needed to conduct an analysis of our plans taking into account new moments in the American side's approach," he said in remarks shown on ORT television.

Mamedov said the agreement includes a clause allowing either party to pull out "in case of a threat to national interests." He said the two delegations were discussing specifics of the agreement Monday as well as overall strategic stability issues.