Senior officials from Russia and the United States are meeting at the US diplomatic mission in Geneva on Wednesday to initiate arms control talks dubbed "strategic stability" with a focus on risk reduction,
Deutsche Welle reports.
US Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman and her counterpart, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov, are leading their respective delegations.
The talks come after US President Joe Biden met Russian President Vladimir Putin in Geneva for a little over three hours last month. Wednesday's talks are the first demonstrable concrete outcome from that summit between the two leaders.
While the exact scope of Wednesday's talks has not been made public, analysts and both countries view them as the start of a process.
The US and Russia are in possession of roughly 90% of the world's nuclear weapons.
In Geneva last month, Biden and Putin agreed to launch these bilateral talks on what is being termed "strategic stability" by both sides to "lay the groundwork for future arms control and risk reduction measures."
Andrey Baklitskiy, a senior research fellow at the Center for Advanced American Studies at Moscow State Institute of International Relations, told reporters in Geneva: "Russia still has concerns with US modification of heavy bombers and launchers to launch ballistic missiles, and that's been there for a while now."
The Biden administration, on the other hand, has voiced concerns over Russia engaging unilaterally in low-yield nuclear testing, in violation of a nuclear testing moratorium.
