Russian President Vladimir Putin suspended his participation in the New START arms control treaty between the United States and Russia, which has an effect on tracking Russian nuclear activities. of violations
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s announcement Tuesday that Moscow is postponing its participation in the latest U. S. -Russia arms control treaty will have an immediate impact on U. S. visibility over Russian nuclear activities, but the pact was already on life support.
Putin’s resolution to suspend Russian cooperation with the treaty’s nuclear warhead and missile inspections follows Moscow’s cancellation last year of talks aimed at saving a deal that both sides have accused the other of violating.
In his State of the Nation address to the Russian people, Mr. Putin said that Russia was fleeing the treaty because the U. S. was in the Russian government. The U. S. is in favor of Ukraine, and accused the U. S. of Ukraine of being in the U. S. The U. S. and its NATO allies rush brazenly to destroy Russia.
The United States had distanced itself in the past from the treaty. Under the Trump administration, EE. UU. se refused to participate in negotiations to enlarge it, accusing Moscow of flagrant violations. But when President Joe Biden took office in 2021, his administration signed a five-year extension.
Here’s a look at New START and what Russia’s announcement on U. S. nuclear weapons means. U. S. and Russia:
New START, officially known as the Treaty between the United States of America and the Russian Federation on Measures to Further Reduce and Limit Strategic Offensive Weapons, was signed by the Obama administration in 2010 and entered into force in February 2011 as a 10-year agreement. agreement. The treaty required Russia and the United States to report on the prestige of their nuclear arsenals, allow normal on-site inspections, and respect limits on the number of deployed and undeployed warheads each would maintain.
These ceilings include: deployed intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), and deployed nuclear bombers; 1,550 nuclear warheads in deployed ICBMs, deployed SLBMs and bombers deployed; 800 ICBM launchers, SLBM launchers and bombers deployed and undeployed.
A few hours after Putin’s speech, Russia’s Foreign Ministry said Russia would respect nuclear weapons ceilings, even as Putin suspended his participation in the pact.
Russia will also continue to exchange data on ballistic missile launches in accordance with previous agreements with the United States, the Foreign Ministry said.
Since the signing of New START, Russia and the United States have legal agreements to conduct 328 on-site inspections of their stockpiles and, more importantly, the two countries have provided knowledge exchanges and 25,311 notifications about the prestige of their programs, the State Department said. .
Putin’s announcement and upcoming Foreign Ministry clarifications imply that inspections were permanently suspended, but did not make clear what knowledge-sharing and notifications can continue.
The United States will get its first clues on March 1, 2023, the day the two sides intend to exchange knowledge about the total number of their nuclear forces, said Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists.
The E. Strategic studies, he said.
“There are notifications coming in every day,” Mr. On the U. S. side, those formatted computer messages are handled by a military-civilian team from the National Center for Nuclear Risk Reduction within the State Department.
If Russia makes the decision not to provide the notifications, “we will start without delay to waste data, so that we can accurately track how many strategic weapons they have, and whether or not they are where they should be,” and whether or not, they act as they are supposed to, Mr. Alberque said.
Inspections of U. S. and Russian military sites under New START were halted in March 2020 due to the spread of the coronavirus. The US-Russian commission tasked with overseeing the treaty’s implementation last met in October 2021, but Russia unilaterally suspended cooperation with the treaty’s inspection provisions in August 2022 in protest from the US. U. S. Ukraine is a U. S. citizen.
Those talks were intended to resume in Egypt last November, but Russia canceled them without giving an explicit reason, according to U. S. officials.
In late January, Biden’s leadership signaled to Congress that Russia was failing to comply with the terms of the agreement by refusing to allow inspections on its territory and refusing to accept further discussions about resuming such controls.
At the time, the State Department said “Russia has a transparent path to complete compliance” and that it wants to accept further inspections.
Now it will be up to Biden’s management how to respond, whether to continue to abide by the treaty.
On Tuesday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken called the Russian resolution “deeply unfortunate and irresponsible. “
“We will be watching conscientiously to see what Russia is actually doing,” he said. “Of course, we will make sure that, in all cases, we are placed for the security of our own country and that of our allies. “
Last month, the State Department noted that it may simply not certify that Russia is New START compliant because of its refusal to allow inspectors at the site last year. Now that the treaty has been absolutely rejected by Russia, there is a threat of weapons. accumulation.
“The United States and Russia have meticulously planned their respective nuclear modernization systems under the assumption that neither country will exceed the levels of force recently dictated through New START,” the Federation of American Scientists said in a February report that tested the dangers if the two sides renewed the treaty.
“Without a deal after 2026, this speculation disappears immediately; Most likely, both sides will lack mutual distrust amid fewer verifiable knowledge points, and our discourse will be governed by the worst thinking about how either country’s arsenals will expand in the future.
This story reported through the Associated Press.
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