The Russia-Ukraine war: Putin’s decision on Start III which could mean the end of formal arms control

When President Vladimir Putin announced at the end of a 100-minute speech on Tuesday that he would suspend Russia’s participation in the New START treaty – the last arms control agreement still in force between the two major nuclear powers – it was one more indication that the era of formal gun control may die.

Even before Putin called the implementation of the inspections required by the treaty “nonsense”, the treaty was already in dire straits. The State Department announced it last month the Russians were not fulfilling their treaty obligations.

Putin has made it clear that he will not withdraw from the treatywhich expires in February 2026. It also made no threats to deploy more strategic nuclear weapons — the kind that can cross continents — beyond the limits of the treaty, which keeps both sides with 1,550 nuclear weapons.

But he clarified that the United States will not inspect Russian nuclear facilities, a key element in verifying compliance with the treaty. And more generally, he presented himself as a leader fed up with arms control at a time of escalating confrontation with the United States and NATO.

The risks

If this attitude holds, whoever sits in the Oval Office when the treaty expires in just over a thousand days could find itself facing a new world that, at first glance, It will seem half a century agowhen the arms race was in full swing and countries could have as many nuclear weapons as they wanted.

Putin claimed he was forced to make that decision. “They want to inflict a ‘strategic defeat’ on us”he said, echoing a phrase US officials have used to describe the outcome they want for Russia in the war against Ukraine, “and climb our nuclear facilities.”

He said the Ukrainians had previously used drones to attack Russia’s strategic airbases, where the air force holds bombers capable of delivering nuclear weapons.

He said he would not allow inspectors to check those facilities, because they could have passed the information to the Ukrainians so they could launch new attacks. “This is the theater of the absurd,” she said. “We know the West is directly involved attempts by the Kiev regime to attack the bases”.

None of this changes the status quo much. Nuclear inspections were suspended during the COVID pandemic when inspectors from both sides were barred from entering Russia or the United States.

But over the past year, as travel restrictions have been lifted, the Russians have found excuses to withhold inspections and have accused, as Putin did again on Tuesday, the United States of they don’t even meet the inspection requirements.

The United States maintains some visibility over the Russian arsenal, mainly thanks to satellites that track Russian nuclear movements. But there is a deeper cause for concern. The five-year extension of New START that President Joe Biden and Putin agreed to in the first month of Biden’s presidency is the only one authorized by the deal, which was negotiated during Obama’s presidency.

This means that a completely new treaty would have to be drawn up.. And while US officials insist they want to negotiate a new treaty, it’s increasingly difficult to imagine that happening in the next three years.

what’s coming

The reasons are many. First of all, there is practically no communication between the two countries. The “strategic talks on stability” that Biden and Putin agreed to in June 2021, in their only face-to-face meeting as presidents, have been suspended following the invasion of Ukraine.

Secondly, trust between the two countries is practically non-existent. Putin and Biden have not spoken directly to each other for over a year. Since then, Biden has called the Russian leader a war criminal and Putin branded the US president as an aggressor to Ukraine.

Privately, US officials sometimes acknowledge that even if they negotiate a treaty, it would be nearly impossible to imagine the Senate ratifying it on these terms.

Third, the treaty in its current form does not cover the nuclear weapons of major concern to the world in conflicts such as the one in Ukraine: the “battlefield nuclear weapons, or tactical nuclear weapons, which Putin has sporadically threatened to use against the Ukrainian forces. Russia has about 2,000; United States, several hundred.

Finally, another Moscow-Washington treaty no longer makes sense to most nuclear experts. The Pentagon now estimates that China, which is rapidly expanding its arsenal, could deploy 1,500 weapons over the next 12 years, matching the US and Russian arsenals. Therefore, an arms control treaty that excluded one of the great three powers would be all but pointless.

And so far, China has shown no interest in joining the negotiations, if any.

However, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said after Putin’s speech on Tuesday that he would be willing to negotiate a new treaty that would benefit “clearly the security interests of our country” and, he added, “Russia’s security interests”.

Putin’s announcement, he noted, was “deeply unfortunate and irresponsible”. But he suggested that the United States would not fail to comply with the treaty, no matter what Russia did.

“I think it’s important to continue to act responsibly in this area,” he said. “It’s also something the rest of the world expects from us.”