MOSCOW — A top Russian military official lashed out at the United States Friday over what Moscow sees as a failed preliminary round of talks on a new nuclear weapons reduction treaty.

Colonel-General Leonid Ivashov, who heads the Defense Ministry's international cooperation division, said the United States was dooming new arms control talks by seeking to change the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty.

"Perhaps the Foreign Ministry would put it more gently but there were no results from these talks," Ivashov told reporters after three days of discussions on a new START-3 treaty.

Ivashov, one of Russia's most hawkish officials on defense and foreign policy, reiterated Moscow's view that U.S. plans to modify the ABM Treaty would wreck past arms control agreements.

"The ABM treaty is the basis on which all subsequent arms controls agreements have been built," he said.

"To destroy this basis would be to destroy the entire process of nuclear arms control."

U.S. and Russian officials including Ivashov ended three days of Moscow talks Thursday on a START-3 nuclear weapons reduction treaty and America's wish to change the ABM agreement.

START-3 is aimed at adding to the cuts in nuclear arsenals due to be made under START-2, signed in 1993 and which foresees a reduction in stockpiles of each country to 3,500 warheads by 2003.

But even that 1993 treaty is still facing troubles as it has languished for six years without the approval of Russia's Communist-dominated State Duma, the lower house of parliament.

A member of the U.S. House of Representatives Armed Services Committee called Ivashov's comments obstructionist given Russia's failure to approve START-2.

"I want to know why they can't ratify the START-2 agreement," Ellen Tauscher, a Democrat from California, told reporters in Moscow after a trip to one of Russia's closed nuclear research cities.

Yet Ivashov said U.S. moves on a new ABM system overshadowed everything else in arms control by seeking to present Russia with a fait accompli about which it could do little. "All this is done in violation of the obligations of the 1972 ABM treaty," he said.

The ABM treaty bans full systems designed to shoot down the other side's missiles. But the United States now plans to build a similar shield against missile programs it fears are being developed by countries such as Iran and North Korea.

A U.S. embassy spokesman said Defense Secretary William Cohen would meet his Russian counterpart Igor Sergeyev on September 13 or 14 in Moscow.

The next round of lower level talks on a START-3 deal are to continue in September in Washington.

Ivashov said tensions with NATO over Yugoslavia made it more difficult to reach agreement in arms control as well.

"The United States and NATO are trying to bring about their own order (in Yugoslavia), at the same time shutting the governments of the region out of the process," he said.

Russia strongly opposed NATO's March-June air strikes against its Slavic, Orthodox brethren in Yugoslavia. Its peacekeepers have been working with NATO forces on the ground in Kosovo since the end of the war but strains remain.