After refusing to act on the treaty for several years, parliament was showing signs that it was ready to move. A visiting US delegation said earlier this month that it thought Russia's parliament might ratify the treaty before the end of this year.

Vladimir Ryzhkov, the deputy speaker of parliament's lower house, said the treaty was put on the agenda for the spring session of the state Duma.

``This, of course, does not guarantee either the ratification of the treaty, or even that it will be considered by the state Duma,'' he told Russian news agencies. ``It simply shows that the state Duma intends to continue work in this direction.''

Ryzhkov is a moderate who supports the treaty. But hesaid Russian lawmakers still had a ``sharply negative attitude'' toward last week's US and British air strikes against Iraq.

PTI reports from Beijing quote Chinese military experts saying ``US and Britain were in pursuit of a `hidden agenda', to wrest control of the vast oil reserves in the Gulf and maintain strategic advantage in the region, which was exposed by their joint aerial strikes''.

The experts have dismissed the four-day air strikes as `much ado about nothing' though Washington and London claimed they had achieved what they wanted, Xinhua news agency reported.

A top general of the Peoples' Liberation Army (PLA) charged the two countries of disregarding the authoritativeness of organisations such as UN by taking military actions to achieve their goals.

Gen Xiong Guangkai, deputy chief of the general staff of the PLA cautioned that great attention should be paid to such military interventions which are threatening the world peace.

Pointing out that air strikes have not obviously broughtabout the fall of Iraqi government, Chen Bojiang, a fellow at the Chinese Academy of Military Science said Saddam's throne still remained unshaken and any anti-government action in Iraq in its infancy.

Prof Zhang Yuliang at the Chinese institute of national defence said the percentage of accurate hits of the cruise missiles used in the strikes was limited according to assessment by even both sides.

However, analysts believe that the real issue was that Beijing felt peeved at not being consulted as a permanent member of the UN Security Council.