Russian deputies approved on Tuesday at first reading the revocation of the ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), a new setback in terms of non-proliferation against a backdrop of conflict in Ukraine and crisis with the West.
This vote comes shortly after Russian President Vladimir Putin called for it, refusing, however, to say whether Russia intended to resume tests.
During a vote in the Duma, the lower house of Parliament, 412 deputies, i.e. all of the elected officials present, said they were in favor of revoking the ratification, in 2000, of the text by Moscow.
This revocation raises fears of new nuclear tests and a strengthening of the arms race. Russia, since the breakup of the USSR, has not conducted any tests. The last one, led by the USSR, dates back to 1990 and that of the United States, to 1992.
Mr. Putin announced at the beginning of October that his country could revoke the ratification of the CTBT in response to the United States which never ratified it.
“I am not ready to say whether or not we should resume testing,” he added, while praising the development of new high-powered missiles that can carry nuclear warheads.
Signed but not entered into force
Since the start of the war in Ukraine in February 2022, Vladimir Putin has blown hot and cold about the use of nuclear weapons.
The Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty was opened for signature in 1996, but it never entered into force because it was not ratified — a necessary step for its entry into force — by a sufficient number of States, among the 44 countries which held nuclear installations at the time of its creation.
Ratification is the act by which a State indicates its consent to be bound by a treaty.
Russia, France and the United Kingdom have done so, but this is not the case for five states which have signed it: the United States, China, Iran, Egypt and Israel. Three other countries, India, Pakistan and North Korea, have neither signed nor ratified it.
“Strategic parity”
On Tuesday, shortly before the vote of Russian deputies, the president of the Duma, Vyacheslav Volodin, assured that it was necessary to revoke this ratification to “defend” Russian citizens and maintain “global strategic parity”.
“Washington must understand once and for all that their hegemony will lead to nothing good,” he said.
Previously, he had affirmed that this revocation was linked to the “war” launched, according to him, by Washington and Brussels against Russia. “Current challenges require new solutions,” he said.
Since the start of his assault on Ukraine, Vladimir Putin has dealt several blows to the nuclear non-proliferation regime.
In the summer of 2023, Mr. Putin began deploying tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus, his closest ally and a country that served as a beachhead for Russia’s offensive in Ukraine.
In February, Russia suspended its participation in the New Start nuclear disarmament treaty signed with the United States in 2010, the last bilateral agreement linking Russians and Americans. Mr. Putin then accused the West of wanting to inflict “a strategic defeat” on Moscow in Ukraine.
This decision was denounced in unison by Western powers, with American President Joe Biden seeing it as “a serious error”.
Russia, heir to Soviet nuclear power, and the United States between them hold nearly 90% of all existing nuclear weapons.