On March 9, 2011, the President of Russia Dmitry Medvedev met with the American Vice President Joseph Biden in Moscow. The Russian head of state said that Russia was ready to create a strategic relationship with the United States.

Russian government officials are hopeful that the United States would help Russia join the World Trade Organization in 2011. President Medvedev also asked the American Vice President to work with Congress to graduate Russia from Jackson-Vanik. The Jackson-Vanik amendment, adopted in 1974, precludes Russia from receiving preferred nation status on the basis of the former Soviet Union’s restrictions on Jewish emigration and is now thought to be an undeserved impediment in the U.S.-Russian commercial relationship.

Russia’s endeavors to join the World Trade Organization have also taken a long while, as the country has been pursuing multilateral negotiations since 1994. Officials in the Russian government are optimistic that those efforts will at last pay off very soon. The help of the United States in Russia’s accession to the WTO will be instrumental.   

Meanwhile, Russian-American business and scientific cooperation also saw significant progress as of late. On March 24, 2011, the state-run company Techsnabexport, a division of Rosatom, entered into a USD-2.8-billion contract with the American-based company USEC for enriching uranium. As reported by the CEO of Rosatom Sergei Kiriyenko, the contract will provide for Techsnabexport’s supplying uranium to the U.S. company over a 10-year period commencing in 2013. Techsnabexport will ship to the United States 21 million SWUs (separative work units, a unit of uranium enrichment) of uranium.

The Rosatom chief also said that Russia and the United States began negotiations on constructing and launching a joint uranium-enrichment facility in the United States that would function with the use of Russian nuclear technologies.

“The construction of a facility is a more advanced form of technological cooperation, and it is a long process that we cannot complete in one day, but today we have made the first step in this direction,” Sergei Kiriyenko is reported to have said. While both sides understand that the feasibility of building the nuclear plant will now have to be reevaluated based on the events at Japan’s Fukushima reactors and the possibility of falling demand, there is agreement that the facility would have a capacity sufficient for it to be economically viable.

In the recent months, the central messages of President Medvedev and President Obama have become very much alike. Both leaders talk about the need to create jobs and develop innovative technologies. The cooperation of Russia and America in peaceful nuclear energy is an example of how the two countries can join expertise in a cutting-edge field and work together for a better future.