MOSCOW: Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said yesterday that the presidents of Russia and the United States are unlikely to sign a new treaty to curb their nuclear arsenals when they meet in Copenhagen this week.

Lavrov also complained that US negotiators had slowed down the pace of work in the past two days in Geneva, hampering efforts to finalize a replacement to the successor to the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START).

"This is unlikely to happen in Copenhagen," Lavrov said. "We still have a big workload - of a purely technical character - facing us."