Vladimir Putin suspended Russia’s participation in this arsenal limitation agreement signed with the United States in 2010. Its mutual verification clause was no longer respected since 2020.
by Piotr Smolar (Warsaw, Special Envoy) and Benoît Vitkine (Moscow, correspondent)
The subject is one of the few on which Moscow still has a pressure lever on Washington. Tuesday, February 21, Vladimir Putin announced “suspend” Russia’s participation in the New Start Treaty for Nuclear Army Reduction. “They want to inflict a strategic defeat on us, attack our nuclear sites (…) and we should do as if nothing had happened,” launched the Russian president to justify his decision, at his address to the nation .
The mention of “nuclear sites” could refer to the two drone strikes conducted by the Ukrainian army on the Engels aerodrome, in December 2022, in the Sarato region, where Tupolev of the Russian strategic fleet.
Signed in 2010, the New Start Treaty is the last bilateral agreement of the genus Russian and American binding. It limits to 1,550 the number of nuclear heads (against 2,200 previously) of each of the parties and the number of launchers to 700. But its main added value lies in the mutual verification missions, between Russian and American experts.
“Keep a responsible approach”
This effort of transparency ended up jumping. In March 2020, the inspections were suspended due to COVID-19. In August 2022, Russia formally closed access to its nuclear sites for American inspectors. In November, she canceled a meeting of the bilateral committee, provided for in Cairo. Without reduces the importance of the decision taken by Vladimir Putin, the latter formalizes an already gray reality.
Moscow will continue to respect the limitation imposed on its nuclear arsenal, however assured the Russian Foreign Ministry of Affairs in the process. “Russia intends to keep a responsible approach,” the ministry said in a statement. Russia has no interest, given its gigantic needs for conventional armaments, to take the initiative of a nuclear arms race.
It was former president Barack Obama who signed this treaty in 2010 with his Russian counterpart, Dmitri Medvedev. At the time, he had made it one of the cornerstone of his foreign policy as well as innerly success, by tearing up the majority of two thirds in the Senate. For his part, once elected, Donald Trump had criticized New Start , in 2017, during an interview with Vladimir Putin.
When he arrived at the White House, in January 2021, Joe Biden did not dream of a revival of bilateral relations with Moscow. Its ambition was to make them predictable, to limit the external harmful of Russia, to find a handful of compromise subjects. The limitation of armaments appeared at the top of the list.
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