MOSCOW. Feb 3 (Interfax) - During the past two years the Russian side has been waiting for NATO proposals in the sphere of control over conventional armaments in Europe; further foot-dragging will reduce the chances of the success of the possible talks, director of the Russian Foreign Ministry department for security and disarmament Mikhail Ulyanov has said.
"As far as we know now the alliance is trying to work out a new consolidated approach. That is generally normal, allies have the right to that when it comes to military-political issues. But there should be some reasonable timeframe. The longer the pause, the smaller the chances of success," he said in an interview with Interfax.
The NATO side "promised to come up with its ideas at the beginning of 2012, we have been waiting ever since," he said.
Ulyanov said that in 2007 Russia suspended the CFE Treaty. "By the way, the suspension was a forced measure for us. Frankly speaking we were driven to that. Our partners from NATO made a serious miscalculation - for some reason they had been sure that Russia was in dire need of an agreement and that could be used for making endless claims to us unrelated to the ratification of the adapted CFE Treaty," he said.
He said that the United States responded to the Russian offer to hold a dialogue on the issue four months after the moratorium on CFE was announced. "Meanwhile, Europeans who call CFE a cornerstone of European security preferred that Russia and the USA agree on this cornerstone. They actually dissociated themselves which arouses serious questions, of course," Ulyanov said.
He said that there were several rounds of Russian-American consultations on CFE "but then Americans lost interest in the subject even though solutions could have been found at the time."
"Then after a time NATO partners made a new attempt and there were ten rounds of consultations in 2010 and the beginning of 2011on the 36 format [30 initial parties to the treaty + six new NATO member-countries]. But preliminary conditions were again put forward to the Russian side, and the talks again ran into a blind alley," the diplomat said.
"The road of control over conventional armaments in Europe has proven quite thorny and remains such," he said.
"However, there still is a chance of reviving it. But it should not be the old CFE or its adapted version but a qualitatively new mode meeting the present-day reality. Russia is ready to take part in developing it," Ulyanov said.