Russia suspends participation in nuclear disarmament treaty | War in Ukraine
Three days before the first anniversary of the invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin gave a very offensive speech on the West.
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.< /p>
Signed in 2010, this treaty is the last bilateral agreement of its kind linking the two powers. Russia had already announced in early August suspending planned US inspections of its military sites as part of the agreement, claiming to act in response to US obstacles to Russian inspections in the United States.
They want to inflict a strategic defeat on us and are going after our nuclear sites. This is why I am compelled to announce that Russia is suspending its participation in the [New] Start treaty, the Russian president said in a speech strongly hostile to Westerners.
< p class="e-p">In particular, he 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 of ;Engels, some 500 kilometers from the Ukrainian border.
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M. Putin also called on the Russian authorities to be ready for nuclear weapons testing if Washington conducted any first.
No one should harbor illusions, strategic parity could be altered, hammered the Russian president.
He further called it a theater of the absurd that NATO demanded that Russia enforce New Start and allow access for inspections of Russian military nuclear sites.
Vladimir Putin promises to continue what he describes as a special operation in Ukraine.
Through NATO officials we are given ultimatums: “You, Russia, do everything we agreed to, including New Start, and we, we will do what seems good to us", launched the master of the Kremlin.
Mr. Putin thus suggested that NATO join the 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 perfect them, modernize them and they are directed against us, he said again.
Before this announcement, the Kremlin had accused the United States in early February of ;having destroyed the legal framework of the New Start treaty, the day after Washington accused Moscow of failing to meet its obligations.
Signed in 2010, this agreement limits both countries' arsenals to a maximum of 1,550 deployed warheads on either side, a reduction of nearly 30% from the previous limit set in 2002.
