The United States, alarmed by the fate of Russia's 40,000-tonne stockpile of nerve and chemical agents, agreed in 1996 to give Moscow around $800 million to help finance its destruction. But it froze the money in 1999, complaining Russia was not sticking to its part of the bargain.

Kiriyenko visited Washington last week for talks which he said had broken the logjam. As part of the deal two senior U.S. delegations will visit Russia in the near future, he said.

"We have a general agreement that by the time President Bush visits Russia in May the process of unfreezing the funds should have been completed," he said in an interview during an official visit to Canada.

"In principle we have now agreed on the political level that this problem is no more. We still need work at the expert level. A big group of U.S. experts from the State and Defense departments will arrive in Russia on Feb. 26 charged with carrying out consultations."

Russia is now working on a special installation at Shchuchye, in western Siberia, which is intended to destroy the bulk of Russia's chemical arsenal.

"A group of congressmen also want to visit in March to see what's happening at the Russian installations. We'll have something to show them," Kiriyenko said.

Russia says it has already destroyed all of its category three chemical weapons - the lowest - ahead of schedule and will also have disposed of the category two weapons earlier than planned.

This leaves the bulk of Russia's arsenal, which it inherited from the Soviet Union. That's around 30,000 tonnes of category one toxic agents such as sarin, soman, tabun, VX, sulphur mustards and lewisites.

Kiriyenko said there was no chance of destroying the entire stockpile by April 2007, as originally envisaged, given that the earliest the Shchuchye plant would be ready is 2005. Moscow last year proposed extending the deadline to 2012.

"Most likely it'll work like this - we won't immediately extend the deadline for everything (to be destroyed) to 2012 but we'll do it by stages," Kiriyenko said.

The huge Russian stockpile came back into the spotlight after the Sept. 11 suicide attacks on the United States and Kiriyenko said both sides should look into how the weapons could be disposed of quickly as possible.

"We and the Americans are worried about this and need to look for ways to do this faster and escape from the threat (of the weapons' possible misuse) more quickly. Of course this will mean spending more money," he said.

During his visit to Ottawa Kiriyenko signed an agreement with Canada on the need to destroy the weapons and said Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien would announce a substantial increase in Ottawa's contribution during a trip to Russia later this month.