Russia to US: Don't brandish ultimatums on arms control treaty
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov has called on the United States to stop brandishing ultimatums over the collapse of their arms treaty and abandon its hostile stance towards Russia.
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President Vladimir Putin has announced the suspension of Russia’s participation in the New START treaty, an agreement signed between the United States and Russia to limit the number of Russian and US deployed strategic nuclear warheads.
The 2011 New START Treaty obliged the United States and Russia to limit deployed intercontinental ballistic missiles, deployed submarine-launched ballistic missiles and deployed heavy bombers equipped with nuclear armaments.
Ryabkov said it was Washington’s fault that the arms control agreements between the two countries, which control about 90 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons, were collapsing.
He said breaching the agreements by Washington and then issuance of ultimatums in this regard was against the spirit of the treaty.
“Talking to the Russian Federation in the language of ultimatums just does not work,” Ryabkov told Russia’s three main news agencies on Saturday.
“Through the fault of the United States, many elements of the former architecture in this area have either been completely destroyed or moved in a semi-lethal state," he added.
Ryabkov said Russia will come back to full compliance with the New START treaty if the US abandons its "hostile stance" toward Moscow.
"Regardless of any measures or countermeasures from the US side, our decision to suspend the START Treaty is unshakable," the TASS news agency quoted him as saying.
"And our own condition for returning to a fully operational treaty is for the US to abandon its fundamentally hostile stance toward Russia,” he added.
Russia says it has concluded that the United States has been in violation of the New START nuclear arms reduction treaty, accusing Washington of being in non-compliance with its provisions and of trying to undermine Russia's national security.
However last week the United States warned that Washington would stop providing Russia with some notifications required under the New START treaty, including updates on its missile and launcher locations, to retaliate for Moscow’s “ongoing violations” of the nuclear agreements.
On the other hand, US national security adviser Jake Sullivan said on Friday that the United States was eager to begin discussions with Russia on a strategic arms limitation pact to replace the New START treaty when it expires in 2026.
In the meantime, a high-ranking Belarusian official said Washington's hostile stance had forced his country to deploy Russian tactical nuclear weapons on its soil.
Belarus had moved its nuclear weapons out of the country following its independence from the former Soviet Union in the 1990s.
Speaking on Sunday, Alexander Volfovich, the state secretary of Belarus' Security Council, said the decision to deploy the nuclear weapons in Belarus once more made sense given the United States' hostile stance.
"Today, everything has been torn down. All the promises made [by the US] are gone forever," the Belta news agency quoted him as saying in a televised interview.
"The deployment of tactical nuclear weapons on the territory of Belarus is, therefore, one of the steps of strategic deterrence," the security official explained.
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