Russian ratification of New START to wait until 2011

The lower house of the Russian parliament, the State Duma, is beginning on Friday the first reading debates on the ratification of the new treaty, passed by the U.S. Senate in a 71-26 vote on Wednesday.

The lawmakers will need second and third readings to address the implications of the wording to U.S. Senate's ratification resolution, said Konstantin Kosachev, the head of the State Duma's International Affairs Committee.

"The second reading will be definitely not held in the framework of the current session, and in January at the earliest," Kosachev said. Russia stops work for 10 days of public holidays from January 1.

Kosachev said Russia will need more time to study the senators' "interpretations" of the pact, which he noted ran to 13 pages instead of the original 11.

It was thought that the Russian parliament could give its approval to the pact as early as Friday afternoon.

"We don't have the right to leave these interpretations unanswered," Kosachev said. "Otherwise, this would break the sense of a treaty based on parity between the parties."

The new treaty, to replace the START 1 agreement that expired in December 2009, was signed in Prague in April by the presidents of Russia and the United States, Dmitry Medvedev and Barack Obama.

The document, which has won the backing of the world's top figures, including NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, trims the Russian and U.S. nuclear arsenals to a maximum of 1,550 nuclear warheads, down from the current ceiling of 2,200. Kazinform cites RIA Novosti. See www.en.rian.ru