MOSCOW. Oct 21 (Interfax) - Arms control talks should be based on mutual respect, whereas U.S. calls for discussing the issue without preconditions are lies, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in an interview with the Argumenty i Fakty publishing house.
He was asked whether U.S. President Joe Biden's statements on starting nuclear arms reduction talks without preconditions could mean the U.S. was inviting Moscow to dialogue.
"No, it's a desire to gain election points for the Democratic Party candidate. It's all insincere," Lavrov said.
"The call for discussing strategic stability and nuclear arms control without preconditions is a lie. What does 'without preconditions' mean? This means that the Americans reserve the right to declare us an adversary in their doctrinal documents and to proclaim a formal goal of inflicting 'a strategic defeat' on Russia on the battlefield. Judging by what U.S. President Joe Biden said, we should accept that, not demand that they abandon such a policy, but sit down and agree on arms reduction," he said.
"Arms control talks should be based on mutual respect and recognition by both sides that there should be no war," Lavrov said.
"They are telling us let's start talks without preconditions, but my goal is to destroy you on the battlefield - is it smart? I do not think so. We invited the United States to start a dialogue of the kind long before the events in Ukraine, which were prepared by the Americans and the British over years and led to the coup and everything that followed," he said.
When the nuclear P5 was holding the strategic dialogue, "the Americans wanted China to join the negotiations on the reduction of their weapons" but China "refused to do so for obvious reasons, as its potential is not yet comparable with that of American and ours," Lavrov said.
"We have no military alliance with China and are not bound by obligations of the kind NATO members have. The alliance [NATO] includes three nuclear powers [the United States, France and the UK]. So, we proposed back then that the dialogue be conducted with due account of the total potential of those three states, which ultimately targets the territory of the Russian Federation geopolitically and practically," he said.
"The United States said no. They said the UK and France made their own decisions, and the Americans did not want to interfere in their affairs. That's ridiculous. Their goal is to promote the idea of arms reduction by Russia and the United States for the purpose of self-promotion and manipulation of public opinion, without touching the stock of Paris and London and the issue of conventional weapons that is inextricably linked with strategic stability, and in which NATO significantly outperforms us. These are elements of strategic stability all of us would want to see," he said.
"Yet the dialogue should be conducted with due account of every factor, including those I have mentioned, without cunningly 'throwing in" a catchy slogan behind which lies the desire to gain unilateral advantages," Lavrov said.
"A couple of months ago, the Americans started to accuse us of planning to deploy nuclear weapons in space and pushed a resolution banning such actions through the UN Security Council," he said.
"We told them that the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, all nuclear powers are members of, bans the deployment of any weapons of mass destruction in space. It is a legal obligation. When the Americans decided to repeat it for some reasons, we asked about conventional weapons and said why not supplement the Outer Space Treaty with the initiative promoted by Russia and China and sign another treaty to prevent any arms race in space. The only one blocking it is the United States. When they proposed that the resolution reaffirm the ban on deploying nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction in space, they meant they wanted to bring conventional weapons there," Lavrov said.
"They are refusing to ban any militarization of space. That's the kind of partners that we have. We've known them for a long time. We've gotten used to them," he said.