- The Duma is moving quickly to suspend the treaty on Putin’s orders
- The new START agreement is the last surviving nuclear deal with the US
- Minister says Russia may take more ‘countermeasures’
LONDON, February 22 (Portal) – Russia will stick to agreed nuclear missile limits and continue to update the United States on changes in its deployments, a senior defense official said on Wednesday, despite the suspension of its last remaining arms control treaty with Washington.
Both chambers of Russia’s parliament quickly voted to suspend Moscow’s participation in the New START treaty, confirming a decision President Vladimir Putin announced Tuesday when he accused the West of inflicting a “strategic defeat” on Russia in Ukraine .
But a senior Defense Ministry official, Major General Yevgeny Ilyin, told the Lower House, or Duma, that Russia would continue to honor agreed restrictions on nuclear delivery systems — that is, missiles and strategic bomber aircraft.
The RIA news agency quoted Ilyin as saying Moscow will continue to provide Washington with notifications of nuclear deployments to “prevent false alarms, which is important for maintaining strategic stability.”
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Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov also issued a reassuring note. “I don’t think the decision to suspend the New START treaty brings us any closer to nuclear war,” he said in a comment quoted by the Interfax news agency.
The assurances indicated that Putin’s move would have little immediate practical impact, even if it cast doubt on the long-term future of a treaty aimed at reducing nuclear risk by giving both sides a degree of transparency and predictability offers.
Putin has a long track record of trying to mislead and unsettle the West. Since Russian troops invaded Ukraine a year ago, he has repeatedly bragged about Russia’s nuclear arsenal and said he would be ready to deploy it if the country’s “territorial integrity” was threatened.
CONTRACT LIMITS
The new 2010 START treaty caps each country’s deployed nuclear warheads at 1,550 — a level Russia intends to maintain — and the deployment of missiles and heavy bombers at 700.
Security analysts say its potential collapse, or failure to replace it after the 2026 deadline, could spark a new arms race at a dangerous moment when Putin is increasingly portraying the Ukraine war as a direct confrontation with the West.
Asked under what circumstances Russia would return to the deal, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said: “Everything will depend on the position of the West… If there is a willingness to take our concerns into account, the situation will change.”
Interfax quoted Ryabkov as saying: “We will of course closely monitor the further actions of the United States and its allies, also in order to take further countermeasures if necessary.”
Responding to a CNN report that earlier this week Russia had unsuccessfully tested its Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile – a weapon capable of carrying multiple nuclear warheads – Interfax quoted Ryabkov as saying: “You can’t trust everything that’s in the… Media appears, especially when the source is CNN.”
FREEZE INSPECTION
The suspended treaty gives each side the right to inspect the other side’s sites – although visits have been halted since 2020 due to COVID and the Ukraine war – and obliges the parties to provide detailed communications on the numbers, locations and technical characteristics of their strategic nuclear weapons close .
For example, each must tell the other when an ICBM is to be shipped from a manufacturing facility. According to the US State Department, the two sides have exchanged more than 25,000 notifications since the agreement entered into force in 2011.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Tuesday the announced suspension of Russia was “deeply regrettable and irresponsible”. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said it was making the world more dangerous and urged Putin to reconsider.
Russia is now demanding that British and French nuclear weapons aimed at Russia be included in the arms control framework, a position Washington sees as a false start after more than half a century of bilateral nuclear deals with Moscow.
Additional reporting by Lidia Kelly Edited by Gareth Jones, Peter Graff and Mark Heinrich
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Mark Trevelyan