MOSCOW: Washington and Moscow pledged on Friday to uphold the “spirit” of the START nuclear arms treaty and to seek a new agreement as soon as possible, hours before the landmark 1991 pact was to expire.

US President Barack Obama and his Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev said in a joint statement they would keep pushing for nuclear disarmament, despite failing to cut a last-minute deal by the treaty’s December 5 expiration date.

“We express our commitment, as a matter of principle, to continue to work together in the spirit of the START Treaty following its expiration, as well as our firm intention to ensure that a new treaty on strategic arms enter into force at the earliest possible date,” the statement added. The Obama

administration had pushed hard for a new START agreement as part of its efforts to improve strained US ties with Russia, but disputes over US monitoring of Russian missiles had bogged down talks in recent weeks.

An English-language version of the statement released by the US State Department stressed that “the (security) assurances recorded in the Budapest Memoranda will remain in effect” after the treaty expires. Signed in 1991, the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty led to deep cuts in the US and Russian nuclear arsenals and came to be seen as a cornerstone of strategic arms control. US and Russian negotiators had held frenetic talks in Geneva in recent weeks to thrash out a successor to the hugely complex treaty. Obama and Medvedev spoke over phone on Friday and agreed to give an “additional impulse” to the Geneva negotiations, the Kremlin said in a statement.

Hours before the midnight deadline, there was no

sign of a last-minute deal, nor was there any announcement of an interim agreement to extend verification measures from the 1991 treaty. Such measures had helped build trust between the former Cold War foes and reduce the threat of nuclear Armageddon.

Facing the end of the treaty, a US inspection team on Friday ended nearly 20 years of monitoring at Russia’s leading missile-production plant.

The 20 US inspectors quit their posts at the plant in Votkinsk, about 580 km

northeast of Moscow, a spokesman for the US Embassy in Moscow told AFP.