MOSCOW, April 8 (RIA Novosti) – The United States is planning to suspend cooperation with Russia on a decades-old program providing for the disarmament of weapons of mass destruction due to its objections over the crisis in Ukraine, the Moscow-based Kommersant newspaper reported Tuesday, citing a senior US official.
Anne Harrington, the Deputy Administrator for Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation at the US National Nuclear Security Administration, said all ongoing joint work under the Nunn-Lugar program on the physical protection of nuclear facilities in Russia had been halted, Kommersant reported.
Cooperative projects under the program have now been postponed and expenditures for the US International Material Protection and Cooperation Program have also been reduced by 27 percent, according to the paper.
The US has also frozen funds that had been set aside to finance the transportation of highly-enriched uranium and plutonium in Russia as well as the construction of security complexes at nuclear facilities in Ozyorsk and Sarov.
The Russian Foreign Ministry earlier warned that sanctions against Russian officials will backfire on the United States and such rhetoric in relation to Russia was unacceptable and counterproductive. Moscow also vowed to respond proportionally to each hostile move on the part of the U.S.
The Nunn-Lugar Program was adopted in 1991 to provide US assistance to countries of the former USSR in dismantling weapons of mass destruction and their associated infrastructure. The total budget of the program has been estimated at about $9 billion.
In 2012, the Russian Foreign Ministry said that a US proposal on extending the decades-old program was out of sync with Moscow’s concept of cooperation in that area. Following the announcement, the two sides agreed to review the program and signed a temporary bilateral framework agreement last year that reduced the number of joint projects and restricted access for US inspectors to nuclear sites.
