Deputy Foreign Minister of the Russian Federation Ryabkov said that the United States manipulated data on strategic offensive arms

The United States of America is manipulating data on strategic offensive weapons, said Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov. According to him, Western countries are trying to earn political points on information about the size of nuclear potentials, which is “hypocritical.”

“Firstly, the claimed figures are often fictitious or arbitrary. The recently published data on US START by the State Department, as before, is misleading due to their inconsistency with the START counting rules, which Washington is stubbornly trying to circumvent by unscrupulous manipulations,” — quotes the words of a diplomat on site foreign policy department.

As a result, Ryabkov explained, “beyond the brackets” remains a significant potential – more than a hundred units of strategic offensive arms, which should be subject to the treaty. In turn, the data on the size of the arsenals of Great Britain and France are not verifiable at all and are of a declarative nature.

The G7’s call for the renewal of the START Treaty does not take into account the willingness to take into account the overall potential of NATO in this context, the Deputy Foreign Minister of the Russian Federation also added. Without this, he pointed out, it will not be possible to seriously discuss the designated topics.