The Russian Foreign Ministry announced on Monday that it would no longer observe its unilaterally adopted moratorium on the deployment of medium- and short-range missiles.
A statement from the Russian Foreign Ministry said that Moscow “no longer considers itself bound“ by “previously adopted self-restraints” under the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, noting that the United States is preparing to deploy intermediate-range missiles in Europe and Asia.
For more than a decade, Washington has accused Moscow of violating the treaty, and Russia has already used missiles with a range prohibited by the treaty during its war against Ukraine, the publication notes, writes the “New York Times“.
The 1987 treaty, also known as the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, banned the development and deployment of ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges of 500 to 5,500 kilometers, the publication points out. As a result of the signing of the agreement by the then leaders of the two countries - Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan, more than 2,600 Soviet and American missiles were destroyed, and this is considered a significant breakthrough during the Cold War.
In 2019, during the first term of President Donald Trump, the United States withdrew from the agreement, the newspaper recalls. The Trump administration claimed that Russia had long violated the treaty by developing and deploying 9M729 cruise missiles for the “Iskander“ system. Russia denied that these missiles had a longer range than specified in the treaty. Moscow then said it would not deploy such weapons unless Washington did the same.
The final collapse of the treaty has raised concerns among Western countries about a return to a dangerous Cold War-style arms race, in which Russian missiles with nuclear warheads deployed in Europe could reach European capitals in a matter of minutes, without warning or the possibility of defense, writes the “New York Times“.
“It is possible that the date of the Russian announcement will go down in history as the beginning of a new missile crisis in Europe“, believes Russian military expert Yuri Fedorov, quoted by the independent newspaper “Moscow Times“. “There will be a missile arms race on both sides“, he believes. "We will have to go through a very tense period, when missiles are deployed both in the West and in the East," Fedorov said.
Despite the heightened tensions between Moscow and the West, Russia's lifting of the moratorium "should not be seen in isolation as some kind of apocalypse - it is part of Russia's game of nuclear escalation," former Russian diplomat Boris Bondarev said.
"For the general public, this does not fundamentally change the situation. When a nuclear power has been threatening other countries with nuclear strikes for four years, we have been living in this reality for a long time - "no moratoriums or their lifting change this in any way," he said.
Russia recently said it would take "mirror measures," including strengthening the Navy's coastal forces and expanding the deployment of hypersonic weapons, if the United States deploys intermediate-range or shorter-range missiles anywhere in the world, the Moscow Times reported.
"Russia's top priority is to ensure the timely detection and interception of such missile launches, while finalizing all aspects of the mass production and deployment of its own similar strike systems, including hypersonic weapons," Russian President Vladimir Putin said in December.
Putin also announced last week - just days before the lifting of the moratorium - that that Russia will step up mass production of the experimental Oreshnik ballistic missile, which has a range of up to 5,500 kilometers and is capable of carrying nuclear warheads, the Moscow Times notes.
Nikolai Sokov, a former Soviet and Russian arms control negotiator and senior fellow at the Vienna Center for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation, says that the launch of the Oreshnik missile against Ukraine last year effectively signaled that Russia was no longer complying with the moratorium.
With the final end of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, the last remaining agreement limiting the nuclear arsenals of the United States and Russia is the 2011 New START treaty, which imposes limits on strategic nuclear weapons, including intercontinental ballistic missiles, the Times reported. It entered into force during Dmitry Medvedev's presidency and expires next February.
Analysts warn that if it is not renewed, it is likely to lead to a new arms race, the paper noted. In April, the Kremlin said it was "very difficult to imagine" how they could start negotiations to renew the treaty amid tensions over the war in Ukraine.
New bilateral nuclear arms agreements between the United States and Russia in the near future are “highly unlikely“ because the necessary level of trust does not exist to negotiate and implement possible arms control agreements, said Siddharth Kaushal, a senior research fellow in military science at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in London, quoted by the “Boston Herald“ newspaper.
The United States is increasingly focusing on other threats - both the administrations of President George W. Bush and the Trump administration withdrew from arms control treaties with Russia, partly because they were concerned that the agreements did not impose limits on the accumulation of nuclear weapons by other countries, such as Iran and China, notes edition.
As China increasingly rivals the United States in terms of the number of nuclear weapons, it could lead to a “competitive spiral” in which Washington could develop more nuclear as well as conventional weapons to counter what it perceives as a threat from Beijing, Kaushal said. Any increase in the US arsenal of medium- or long-range weapons could in turn prompt Russia to increase its own nuclear arsenal, he added.
“That doesn’t mean there can’t be a diplomatic process to resolve this issue in the future. But it seems that for now, at least, the mood is to build (missiles) rather than negotiate,” concluded arms control expert Andrei Baklitsky.