Alexander Golts: "Forward, in the past"

"In May 1977, more than forty years ago, a meeting of the heads of foreign policy departments of the United States and the USSR took place in Geneva. At the end of which Secretary of State Cyrus Wence informed reporters that the parties managed to significantly narrow the sphere of disagreement. But the Soviet Minister Andrei Andreyevich Gromyko with an ordinary sour mine on their faces told that the main differences in the approaches were maintained and maintained and maintained That the United States continues to achieve unilateral advantages, after which the reporters, not without irony, noted Strogub Talbott, who worked in the Time magazine at that time, it only remained to guess if the Soviet Minister and the American Secretary of State on the same three days at the same meeting, ”writes the chief editor of the daily journal .

"A similar issue arises when reading the Kremlin and Belodomovo variants of the telephone conversation of the presidents Biden and Putin, which has been coincided in these messages, is that the leaders of the United States and Russia agreed to extend the February 5 of the expiration of its expiration. The world can breathe a sigh of relief - it will be possible to preserve the last of the current agreements for control over nuclear nuclear The position of the previous American administration, which has put out the conditions that it was impossible to satisfy (connecting to the negotiations of China, the inclusion of non-strategic nuclear weapons) did not allow to extend this agreement The situations that ultimately led to the Caribbean crisis.

Now, restrictions on the number of nuclear weapons (intercontinental missiles and strategic bombers) - up to 700 units and up to 1550 expanded warheads will still remain. In addition, the system of mutual information and verification of the contract will be preserved. That is, Russia and the United States will exchange data on missile launches and the state of nuclear arsenals, to conduct mutual inspections. Most likely, in the very coming days, we will see how the Russian parliament, known for its meticulousness in relation to any initiatives of the Putin administration, will vote for the extension of START. And under American legislation, the approval of the Senate is not required.

However, alas, this, and also a pronounced intention to continue communication, are the only points of coincidence in the Russian and American interpretation of the conversation. So the Kremlin press service said that "topical issues of bilateral and international agenda were discussed. The possibilities of cooperation in the fight against such an acute problem as the Pandemia of Coronavirus, as well as in other areas, including trade and economic." In addition, “among international topics, the United States’s unilateral exit from the Open Sky Treaty, the problems of maintaining a joint comprehensive plan of actions under the Iranian nuclear program, the intra -Ukrainian settlement, as well as the Russian initiative on holding the Summit of the Council of Security Council of the UN” were affected.

But Jen Psaki, a spokesman for the American president, during one of her first briefings, said something else. Bayden, according to her, expressed "decisive support for the sovereignty of Ukraine in the face of ... ongoing aggression of Russia." Other issues discussed included “hacking Solarwinds” (we are talking about attempts to penetrate the closed networks of the US federal departments of which Russian hackers accuse), reports that Russia was appointing awards for the murder of American soldiers in Afghanistan, interference in the 2020 elections, poisoning Alexei Navalny and the appeal of Russian security forces with peaceful protesters. And moreover, "President Biden made it clear that the United States would be firmly acted in defense of their national interests in response to Russia's actions, which harm us or our allies," the White House statement said.

The difficulties of employees of the Kremlin press service, who are strictly forbidden to mention Navalny’s name, as well as the accusations that the United States from Russia, are clear. Obviously, they were to make a message so that none of the readers could have the impression that a person was found in the world who was able to declare this directly to Putin. However, this happened. The Americans decided to do without diplomatic politeness, characteristic of the first contacts of the leaders of the two countries. Which leaves no doubt - Moscow and Washington returned to the relationship between direct confrontation, which, predicts The New York Times, will be characterized by "deep hostility."

There is no doubt that we have an extremely unpleasant period, when the parties have to determine from the borders to which this mutual hostility will spread. It is likely to introduce new sanctions that may be very sensitive to the Russian economy. The Kremlin, as usual, is concentrated on the "Boggering of Voronezh", the tightening of repression against the opposition, in which an increasing number of people will be recorded. I believe that in the end the interaction area will take the form of peaceful coexistence. This term has already been used by independent researchers who were instructed to develop proposals for the NATO strategy for the coming decade. Domestic diplomats so far reject peaceful coexistence, seeing in it a return to the confrontation past. However, I suspect that pretty soon this model of relationships will be the only possible. It actually involves interaction on a single topic - how to avoid mutual destruction.

And now is the time to think about the content of Russian-American negotiations on control of nuclear weapons. So far, the area of ​​consent here is exhausted by the willingness to extend the contract on START. In the absence of others to those where consent is possible in principle, the question inevitably arises, where to move in the field of nuclear disarmament. You can return to the Obama administration rejected by the Kremlin to reduce strategic weapons by a third - up to 1000 warheads. You might think about the revival in one form or another of an agreement on missiles of medium and smaller range. Finally, at least at the level of concepts you can begin to work out the issue of control over tactical nuclear weapons. So far, the proposals on this subject are greeted by sharp objections from the Kremlin, for which it is nuclear weapons that is the only trump card in relations with the West (in the absence of the resources that the USSR possessed: allies, numerous population, industry capable of massive production of ordinary weapons).

At the same time, Russian representatives clearly drew their objections from the boggers of the 1970s and 1980s, who, like a deadline, take into account the requirements of advanced basing (aircraft deployed in Western Europe and on aircraft carriers). In 1974, Leonid Brezhnev made a scandal to the associates in the Politburo and forced him to remove the funds of advanced base from discussion. The same way will have to go now. As the arms race will increase, Moscow will be doomed to take some steps towards. You look, we will be so peaceful and to be paved to changes in the international climate ... "