Russia to boycott nuclear summit

VIENNA – Russia has informed the United States that it will boycott the 2016 Nuclear Security Summit, diplomats told the Associated Press on Tuesday, potentially stripping the meeting of one of its key participants and hurting efforts initiated by President Barack Obama to reduce the threat of nuclear terrorism.

Officials already had told the AP on Monday that Moscow was absent from last week’s initial summit planning session in Washington but had left it unclear whether Russia planned to attend the summit itself.

On Tuesday, two diplomats said the boycott applied to the 2016 meeting as well. They cited as their source a diplomatic note from Moscow to the U.S. and other nations planning to participate.

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 U.N.’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-U.S. 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.

Gary Samore, who advised Obama on nonproliferation until last year, said the Russian decision showed that “nuclear security has become a victim of geopolitics.”

But Samore, now with Harvard’s Belfer Center, said Russia might change its mind by 2016, assuming that “a political settlement in Ukraine can be achieved.”

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.

The summits were initiated by Obama in 2010 and are aimed at preventing terrorists from acquiring 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.