Russian President Vladimir Putin has announced his readiness to adhere to nuclear arms limits for one more year under the last remaining nuclear pact with the United States that expires in February, and he urged Washington to follow suit.
Mr. Putin said allowing the New START agreement signed in 2010 to expire would be destabilizing and could fuel the proliferation of nuclear weapons. He made this remark in a televised speech from the Kremlin.
He said Russia is prepared to stick by the treaty’s limits for one more year after it expires on February 5, 2026. The New START was signed by then US President Barack Obama and Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev to limit each country to no more than 1,550 deployed nuclear warheads and 700 deployed missiles and bombers.
The pact also stipulates the need for on-site inspections to verify compliance, although inspections were halted in 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic and never resumed. The treaty was originally supposed to expire in 2021, but was extended for five more years.
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia said on Monday that he was prepared to extend existing limits on the number of deployed long-range nuclear weapons for one more year as long as the United States did the same, a move that could give Moscow and Washington time to negotiate a new version of the last remaining arms control treaty between them.
Speaking at a meeting of his security council at the Kremlin, Mr. Putin said that Russia wanted to “avoid provoking a further strategic arms race.”
But his motives may involve a more complex brew of issues, including avoiding an expensive buildup in deployed weapons at a time when Russia’s coffers are being drained by the war in Ukraine, and a desire to draw the United States into negotiations on an issue apart from the war.
He may also be seeking to slow, or kill, President Trump’s effort to build what Mr. Trump calls a “Golden Dome” missile defense system, some experts said after examining the Russian leader’s somewhat elliptical wording.
