The US hopes that after the meetings of the working groups on arms control, China will join the talks between Moscow and Washington, the US President’s special representative for arms control, Marshall Billingslea, told reporters on Wednesday.
“I hope that after the expert and technical working groups meet in Vienna in the coming days, we will make sufficient progress, and the Deputy Foreign Minister (Russian Federation Sergey Ryabkov) and I, and if China names our colleague, he or she, we will return to Vienna together to take this discussion to a new stage,” he said during a telephone briefing.
Russian-American consultations on strategic stability were held in Vienna on June 22-23. The Russian delegation at the talks was headed by Ryabkov and the American delegation by Billingsley. They discussed the issue of extending the strategic offensive arms reduction Treaty (Start-3), maintaining stability and predictability in the context of the termination of the INF Treaty. During the consultations, the parties confirmed the launch of the space working group and some others. According to Ryabkov, the next meeting with Billingslea could take place in late July – early August.
