Moscow reportedly decided to end its nuclear cooperation program with the US, saying that Russia no longer needs assistance in safeguarding nuclear sites located in the country, according to the Boston Globe newspaper.

      The newspaper says, referring to its own unnamed sources, that the decision was made at the end of the last year, during the two-sided meeting on December 16. The officials from the US Department of Energy, the US Department of State and the Pentagon, as well as high-ranking Russian officials reportedly signed a special agreement, which puts an end to Russia-US cooperation in protecting weapons-grade uranium and plutonium from being stolen or sold. It also means that some of the cooperative initiatives now has to be abolished abruptly, while some of them were planned to continue at least through 2018.

      As the Boston Globe reports, the Russia-US partnership under a host of Cooperative Threat Reduction programs, was the most effective form of cooperation between the two countries since the end of the Cold War in the 1990s.

      The end of Russia-US cooperation on nuclear safety has become the little part of a big epoch of coolness between the two countries following Russia's annexation of Crimea, Moscow's stance on the crisis in Ukraine and the "war of sanctions".