US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Friday that American and Russian negotiators are “on the brink” of agreement on a nuclear arms reduction treaty. After meeting with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, Clinton said she expects a treaty-signing soon, although she mentioned no date or place. “Our negotiating teams have reported that they have resolved all of the major issues and there are some technical issues that remain,” she said at a joint news conference with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. “But we are on the brink of seeing a new agreement between the United States and Russia,” Clinton added. Her remarks were more pointedly optimistic than just a day earlier, when she cautioned against presuming success soon. On another matter, Lavrov suggested that getting new United Nations sanctions imposed against Iran might not be as urgent as some have suggested. He said the UN nuclear watchdog agency, in its reports on Iran's nuclear program, provides no basis for alarm about its intentions. He said this did not mean that Russia is unconcerned about Iranian behavior, and Russia believes sanctions may be unavoidable. He said new sanctions must not be “aggressive,” and must not “degrade the humanitarian situation” in Iran. Lavrov spoke in Russian and his remarks were translated by an official interpreter. He also said the Iranian government was allowing an opportunity for mutually beneficial dialogue with the West to “slip away.” Clinton said Washington was “pulling together the world” on sanctioning Iran. On the matter of a new nuclear pact, Russian officials have said that a principal sticking point in the nuclear talks was the US plan to build a defensive missile shield in eastern Europe. Russia has insisted that the new treaty acknowledge a link between defensive and offensive systems, and Lavrov was quoted recently as saying that a legally binding provision would be included. US President Barack Obama and Medvedev agreed during their July summit that the new treaty would contain such a provision, but experts said that negotiations had bogged down over the language on the linkage.
