Russia says it will abide by the nuclear arms limits set by the New START Treaty as long as the United States does
Moscow — Moscow will adhere to the latter’s limits Nuclear Weapons Treaty Russia’s top diplomat said on Wednesday that the agreement with the United States, which expired last week, is as long as it sees Washington doing the same thing.
The New START treaty expired on February 5, leaving no restrictions on the two largest atomic arsenals for the first time in more than half a century and stoking fears of nuclear catastrophe. An unrestrained nuclear arms race.
Russian President Vladimir Putin announced last year his willingness to abide by this agreement Treaty limits for another year If Washington follows suit, but US President Donald Trump has said he wants China to be part of a new agreement — something Beijing has rejected.
Speaking on Wednesday in the lower house of parliament, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that although the United States has not responded to Putin’s offer, Russia will respect the New START treaty’s caps as long as it sees the United States abiding by them as well.
“The moratorium announced by the president will remain in place as long as the United States does not exceed these limits,” Lavrov told lawmakers. He added: “We will act in a responsible and balanced manner based on the analysis of US military policies.”
He added: “We have reason to believe that the United States is in no hurry to abandon these borders and that they will be adhered to for the foreseeable future.”
“We will closely monitor how things actually develop,” Lavrov said. He added: “If the intention of our American colleagues to maintain some kind of cooperation in this matter is confirmed, we will actively work to reach a new agreement and look into the issues that remained outside the strategic stability agreements.”
Lavrov’s statement followed a report by Axios claiming that Russian and American negotiators discussed a possible informal agreement to monitor the agreement’s borders for at least six months during talks last week in Abu Dhabi. In response to a request to comment on the report, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Friday that any such extension could only be official, adding that “it is difficult to imagine any unofficial extension in this area.”
At the same time, Peskov confirmed that Russian and American negotiators discussed future nuclear arms control in Abu Dhabi, where delegations from Moscow, Kiev and Washington held two days of talks on a peace settlement in Ukraine.
Peskov said: “There is an understanding, and they talked about it in Abu Dhabi, that the two parties will take responsible positions, and both parties realize the necessity of starting talks on this issue as soon as possible.”
The New START Treaty, signed by then-President Barack Obama and his Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev in 2010, was the latest in a long line of agreements between Moscow and Washington to limit their nuclear arsenals, starting with the SALT I agreement in 1972.
The New START Treaty restricted each side to no more than 1,550 nuclear warheads on no more than 700 missiles and bombers deployed and ready for use. It was originally scheduled to expire in 2021 but has been extended by five years.
The agreement provides for comprehensive field inspections to verify compliance, although they were halted in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic and were never resumed.
In February 2023, Putin suspended Moscow’s participation, saying that Russia could not allow US inspections of its nuclear sites at a time when Washington and its NATO allies had openly declared that they wanted to defeat Moscow in Ukraine. But the Kremlin also stressed that it would not withdraw from the treaty completely, pledging to respect nuclear weapons limits.
In September, Putin offered to keep the New START borders in place for another year in order to buy time for the two sides to negotiate a new agreement.
Even as New START expired, the United States and Russia remained It was agreed on February 5 The United States will resume high-level military dialogue after a meeting between senior officials from both sides in Abu Dhabi, the US military command in Europe said. The link was suspended in 2021 as relations became increasingly tense before Russia sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022.
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