MOSCOW: Moscow and Washington can see a marked improvement in mutual ties as past mistrust is swept aside, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in an article published Tuesday, pledging renewed efforts for a new nuclear arms reduction deal.

"The key to new ties between our countries is reconstruction of trust undermined in past years, and it will require joint efforts in overcoming negative legacies... Interaction, compromise, give-and-take is important here," Lavrov wrote in the Rossiyskaya Gazeta daily.

"We will honestly strive for a timely and full-fledged replacement of the START treaty, which would provide strategic security on the basis of admission that strategic aggressive and defensive weapons are irreversibly linked," Lavrov wrote.

"We know that it will require overcoming the resistance of certain forces within the United States which cannot, by inertia, imagine an equal partnership with Russia," the minister warned.

Earlier, Lavrov said that efforts to clinch a new Russian-US nuclear disarmament deal this year have advanced and negotiators will report to the two countries' leaders by the time President Dmitry Medvedev and his US counterpart, Barack Obama, meet at a G-20 summit this month.

During Obama's landmark visit to Moscow in July, he and Medvedev agreed to hammer out a new nuclear arms reduction pact to replace the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), preferably by the time it expires on December 5.

A declaration signed by Medvedev and Obama at their Moscow meeting fixed no deadline for agreement on a new deal and only instructed negotiators to complete the work as quickly as possible.

"The crisis of trust in our relations with the West as a whole lay in the conflict of expectations as there was no common understanding of what the end of the Cold War stood for. That is where all the misunderstanding came from," Lavrov explained.

However, as "we are wiser now" the anti-US sentiments in Russia also would give way, as "once the reasons for such an attitude vanish, so shall Russian feelings toward America change, and they already do," Lavrov said.