COPENHAGEN — Presidents Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev failed to clinch a pact cutting Cold War stocks of nuclear arms Friday but pledged to work for a deal next year.
Obama told reporters after meeting Medvedev in the Danish capital that Washington and Moscow were “quite close” to agreement, but a senior Kremlin official later said talks would continue in January.
“There will be a little break — they will have Christmas holidays, then we will have ours,” the Kremlin’s foreign policy adviser, Sergei Prikhodko, told reporters.
Neither side disclosed details of why the talks on a successor to the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty had missed a Dec. 5 deadline and have still not produced a result, even after the two leaders met on the fringes of a UN climate change conference in Copenhagen.
The world’s two largest nuclear powers have been trying since April to find a replacement for the treaty.
Obama was careful to avoid any mention of disagreements in his remarks after speaking to Medvedev.
“We’ve been making excellent progress. We are quite close to an agreement. And I’m confident it will be completed in a timely fashion,” he said.
Medvedev said there were “certain technical details … that require further work,” but did not elaborate.
Kommersant reported Saturday that the outstanding issues included the need to agree on the sharing of telemetric data.
“Thanks to the two leaders, we managed to push through three fundamental issues. Two remain and they are far from being technical details. They are serious things which demand political will,” an unidentified participant in Friday’s talks told Kommersant, adding that there was every reason to expect a successful conclusion to the negotiations.
However, the source did not give details of the two remaining problems.
An unnamed source in the Russian delegation told Kommersant that the two sides would not set any more dates or deadlines for the agreement but it would be signed soon.
Shortly before Obama and Medvedev met, Foreign Ministry spokesman Andrei Nesterenko said Moscow was counting on “resolving all the remaining questions in the very near future, if not in hours.”
But Kremlin spokesman Natalya Timakova, who was traveling with Medvedev, later issued a highly unusual public rebuke to Nesterenko, telling reporters that what he said “has nothing in common with reality.”