MOSCOW, May 4 (AVN) - The last full-scale rotation of Russian and US military observers carried out under the auspices of the 1987 INF Treaty will end on Friday, Major General Sergei Burutin, first deputy chief of the Defence Ministry national centre on nuclear threat reduction, told the Military News Agency.
The two military observer missions comprising 30 people each are operating on a permanent basis at the plants that formerly produced intermediate and shorter range ballistic missiles in the town of Votkinsk, Russia's Udmurtian autonomous republic, and in the town of Magna, Utah, USA. The Russian observer group is led by Colonel Andrei Fedorchenko.
The inspection activities on Russian and US observers will end on May 31, 2001. Moscow and Votkinsk will host special events devoted to those operations in late May. Similar events will take place in the USA. The Russian party made 440 inspections to check INF Treaty observation at the plants which produced those missiles in the past 13 years while the US party carried out 770 inspections.
The treaty envisages scrapping of the Soviet and US intermediate (from 1,000 to 5,500km) and shorter (from 500 to 1,000km) range missiles, their launchers, deployment sites and missile bases.