Russia plans nuclear summit boycott

Russia has informed the United States that it will boycott the 2016 Nuclear Security Summit, diplomats told The Associated Press on Tuesday.
Officials already told the AP on Monday that Moscow was absent from last week’s initial summit planning session in Washington but had left unclear whether Russia planned to attend the summit itself.On Tuesday, two diplomats said that the boycott applied to the 2016 meeting as well. They cited as their source a diplomatic note from Moscow to the US and other nations planning to participate. The diplomats spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not allowed to discuss confidential information.

One of the diplomats said the note expressed opposition to the summit because of its alleged political nature. He cited the note as saying that any meeting on nuclear security should be on a technical level and convened not by a nation but by the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency.
Russia has participated in such summits in the past. But the diplomat, who is familiar with Moscow’s stance, said it already had reservations while attending the last meeting in March at The Hague. He did not specify but added that the ‘changed political atmosphere’ — shorthand for Russia-US tensions over Ukraine — added to the Kremlin’s decision to stay away.

In Moscow, Russian foreign ministry officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment.At the last summit, 35 countries discussed turning international guidelines on nuclear security into national laws and opening their procedures for protecting nuclear installations to independent scrutiny. The summit also featured new reduction commitments, with Japan, Italy and Belgium agreeing to cut their stocks of highly enriched uranium and plutonium.But Russian reluctance to go along with the US-backed initiative already was apparent. Moscow refused to back such a 35-nation agreement, as did China, India and Pakistan. All four of those nations have nuclear weapons.

The summits were initiated by US president Barack Obama in 2010 and were aimed at preventing terrorists from getting their hands on weapons-grade nuclear material. Since the first summit, the number of countries that have enough material to build a nuclear weapon has fallen from 39 to 25.Russia’s presence is important both as a world power and a nation with one of the world’s largest nuclear stockpiles.
Such a move also would be the latest sign of strains in US-Russia relations, caused by Washington’s criticism of Russian-backed separatists fighting in Ukraine and the imposition of US economic sanctions against Russia.

Patrick Ventrell, a spokesman for the National Security Council at the White House, on Monday confirmed Russia’s absence from last week’s planning session and said, ‘The door remains open to their joining future such meetings.’ He declined further comment Tuesday, when asked to confirm or deny that Moscow planned to boycott the summit as well.The officials who spoke Monday said that apart from Russia, all 54 countries that participated in the March summit attended the preparatory meeting in Washington.