(President Barack Obama meets with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in the Oval Office of the White House 7 May 2009. Photo credit: Official White House Photo by Pete Souz

After eight months of talks, US President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitri Medvedev are expected to sign a new treaty that would decrease each country’s’ nuclear arsenals by 25 percent, The New York Times reported today.

The deal has taken countless meetings to broker – however, after the two presidents sign the agreement, as they are expected to do between negotiations in Copenhagen, they plan to send negotiators back into discussions to address whole categories of nuclear weapons that have never before been subject to international treaty.

Said The New York Times, the effort is part of Obama’s larger plan to pursue total nuclear disarmament.

Yesterday, however, the BBC reported that an agreement between the two powers was “unlikely” to be signed this week and that Russia blamed the US for the slow down in the talks. Negotiators have already missed one deadline – the treaty was originally to have been signed before the previous 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty expired 5 December. Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, told a news conference in Moscow, “It’s highly unlikely to happen in Copenhagen… We still have a big workload – of a purely technical character – facing us.”