Vladimir Putin has said Russia will halt its participation in New Start, the last major remaining nuclear arms control treaty with the US, in a speech devoted to the one-year anniversary of Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine.
“They want to inflict a strategic defeat on us and claim our nuclear facilities,” the Russian president said during a speech characterised by grievances against the west. “In this regard, I am forced to state that Russia is suspending its participation in the strategic offensive arms treaty.”
The full implications of Putin’s threat were not immediately clear. Russia has already suspended mutual inspections of nuclear weapons sites and participation in a bilateral consultative commission. Experts said that if Putin now went further and stopped routine reporting and data exchange on nuclear weapon movements and other related developments, it would be a serious blow.
“The announcement by Russia that it’s suspending participation in New Start is deeply unfortunate and irresponsible,” the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, told reporters on a visit to Athens. “We’ll be watching carefully to see what Russia actually does. We’ll of course make sure that in any event we are postured appropriately for the security of our own country and that of our allies.”
The 2010 New Start treaty provides for limits on the deployed strategic nuclear arsenals of the world’s two largest nuclear powers, capping strategic nuclear assets at 1,550 deployed warheads and 700 deployed missiles and heavy bombers. The treaty also provides for joint monitoring of each side’s deployed nuclear arsenals, as well as coordination through the bilateral consultative commission.
Later, the Russian foreign ministry announced that Moscow would continue to abide by the limits set by the treaty and would also continue to exchange information with the US on planned launches of intercontinental and submarine-launched ballistic missiles under the 1988 Ballistic Missile Launch Notification Agreement.
Those decisions were taken in order to “maintain a sufficient degree of predictability and stability in the nuclear missile sphere”, the ministry said in a statement.
US officials said the Biden administration had feared Putin might decide to withdraw Russia from the treaty altogether and no longer recognise the agreed limits on the nuclear arsenal. The Russian foreign ministry had summoned the new US ambassador to Moscow, Lynne Tracy, for a meeting on Tuesday, saying it had an important announcement, prompting speculation of a full withdrawal.
Instead, they said, very little had changed as a result of Putin’s announcement formalising the status quo.
“This is a big deal; suspension of the treaty is not equal to withdrawal but in reality, it could become really close over time,” said Andrey Baklitskiy, a senior researcher in the weapons of mass destruction and other strategic weapons programme at the UN Institute for Disarmament Research.
In a nearly two-hour speech, Putin said the treaty could not be kept separate from the war in Ukraine and “other hostile actions of the west against our country”.
He said: “Now, through Nato representatives, they are putting forward, in fact, an ultimatum: you, Russia, must fulfil everything that you have agreed on, including the Start treaty, and we will behave as we please.”
In particular, Putin fumed over Nato support for Ukraine, and claimed the west was seeking a “strategic defeat” of Russia. He also claimed the US was seeking to rewrite the post-second world war security architecture, “to build an American-style world where there is only one master”.
Tatiana Stanovaya, the founder of the R Politik analysis firm, said of the speech: “It feels more doomed, much more irreconcilable. Almost like it is either them or us, even if he does not say it.”
The decision to suspend participation in the arms treaty would mark a new low in US-Russia relations and arms control, one of the few topics on which Moscow and Washington DC could find common ground.
“Details matter, but if Russia is indeed stopping data exchanges and notifications, it would fundamentally change the nuclear relationship with Russia. [The US and Russia] have had some form of strategic arms control in place since 1972,” wrote Jon Wolfsthal, who served as a senior adviser to Barack Obama for arms control and nonproliferation at the national security council.
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“[The] US still has extensive ability to monitor Russian nuclear forces, even without a treaty in place. But the loss of agreements will increase uncertainty and chances of misunderstanding, inflate threat perception and fuel accelerating arms race,” he tweeted.
Putin, in his speech, promised tax breaks for businesses and government support for fighters returning from the war in Ukraine. Much of the speech was extremely conservative given the stress put on Russian society by the country’s first mass mobilisation since the second world war.
He said Russia would resume testing of nuclear weapons if the US did the same, a serious escalation that could mean it was preparing to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine.
Withdrawing from New Start would theoretically allow Russia to end compliance with limits of deployed nuclear weapons and would stop meetings of the bilateral consultative commission, the implementing body of the treaty.
When the treaty was extended in 2021, the then Pentagon press secretary, John Kirby, said the US “cannot afford to lose New Start’s intrusive inspection and notification tools”.
Those notifications include information on the numbers, locations and technical characteristics of weapons systems and facilities.
“Failing to swiftly extend New Start would weaken America’s understanding of Russia’s long-range nuclear forces,” Kirby said then.
Baklitskiy said: “Russia will probably stick to the New Start treaty limits, at least for now, but it will be harder for the US to verify compliance only using the national technical means. And I would expect the US also suspending its obligations.”
“One silver lining is that Russian decision is political and can be easily reversed if the overall political relations change,” he added. “Also, since the treaty exists, getting back to implementation would be straightforward. The problem, of course, is that there is no change of political relations in sight.”