Vladimir Putin announced on Tuesday that Russia was suspending its participation in the New Start agreement on nuclear disarmament and threatened to carry out new nuclear tests if the United States did it first.
Signed in 2010, this treaty is the last bilateral agreement of its kind binding the two powers. Russia had already announced in early August suspending American inspections planned on its military sites as part of the agreement, ensuring that it was acting in response to American obstacles to Russian inspections in the United States.
“They want to inflict a strategic defeat on us, attack our nuclear sites, that’s why I am obliged to announce that Russia is suspending its participation in the (New) Start treaty”, said the Russian president in a river discourse strongly hostile to Westerners.
He notably accused the latter of having helped Ukraine to modernize drones to send them to strategic objectives, a reference to the recent explosions at the base of strategic bombers in Engels, some 500 kilometers from the Ukrainian border.
Mr. Putin also called on the Russian authorities to be “ready for nuclear weapons tests” if Washington carried them out first.
“No one should feed on illusions, strategic parity could be altered,” hammered the Russian president.
He further described as a “theater of the absurd” the fact that NATO demanded that Russia apply New Start and allow “access to inspections of Russian military nuclear sites”.
“Via NATO representatives, we are given ultimatums: ‘You, Russia, do everything we agreed on, including New Start, and we will do what we see fit’. “, accused the master of the Kremlin.
Mr. Putin thus suggested that NATO join New Start to make this treaty fair, “because, within NATO, the United States is not the only nuclear power”.
“France and Great Britain also have nuclear arsenals, they are perfecting them, modernizing them and they are directed against us,” he said.
Prior to this announcement, the Kremlin had accused the 1er February the United States of having “destroyed the legal framework” of the New Start treaty, the day after Washington accused Moscow of “non-compliance” with its obligations.
Signed in 2010, this agreement limits the arsenals of the two countries to a maximum of 1,550 warheads deployed on either side, a reduction of nearly 30% compared to the previous limit set in 2002.