PRETORIA (Reuters) - Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov said on Saturday his country would do its utmost to find a substitute for the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty the United States has decided to abandon.
``We would not like this unilateral step of the United States administration to be to the detriment of strategic stability,'' Ivanov told a media conference in Pretoria.
``We would like to hope that the negative consequences of this abandonment will be minimal and on our part we will do our utmost to achieve that,'' Ivanov said after talks with his South African counterpart.
He said the U.S. decision had undermined the legal foundation for the non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, as well as the entire system to control armaments.
Ivanov added that Russia would continue talks with the United States to hammer out a new framework for the two countries' strategic relationship and to find ways to reduce offensive strategic armaments.
Ivanov and Secretary of State Colin Powell said this week they hoped to conclude a new strategic arms agreement in time for a visit to Russia next year by Bush.
Ivanov, on a tour of southern African states, repeated Russian President Vladimir Putin's belief that the U.S. withdrawal from the 1972 treaty was a mistake but said it had been anticipated.
Critics of President Bush's decision to pull out of the Soviet-era treaty fear the move could spark a new arms race war between Asian nuclear players China, India and Pakistan.
Putin has restated proposals to make large cuts in Moscow's arsenal of strategic nuclear weapons, citing figures of between 1,500 to 2,200 warheads on each side.
That was close to the 1,700 to 2,200 that Bush flagged at the two presidents' summit at his Texas ranch last month.
Bush has long argued that ABM, clinched at the height of the Cold War, has outlived its usefulness and is impeding progress on Washington's plans to build an anti-missile shield against threats from ``rogue states'' like Iran, Iraq an North Korea.
Russia had pressed the United States to keep ABM in place, upholding it as the bedrock of decades of disarmament efforts. But the latest good-natured summit between Putin and Bush at the U.S. president's Texas ranch failed to break the deadlock