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According to Axios, discussions have been underway over the last day in Abu Dhabi, with both nations nearing an agreement to continue adhering to essential aspects of the New START treaty. This treaty imposes limits on the quantity of missiles, launchers, and strategic nuclear warheads each side can possess.
Despite Russian President Vladimir Putin’s proposal to maintain these core stipulations for an additional year, US President Donald Trump has yet to officially respond. This is happening even though extending the treaty in its entirety is not legally feasible.
The Kremlin’s spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, stated that Russia remains open to dialogue with the United States, contingent on a constructive response to Putin’s offer.
“If we receive any constructive feedback, we are certainly prepared to engage in discussions,” Peskov remarked to the press.
The New START treaty stands as the last in a long line of nuclear accords between Russia and the United States, a legacy stretching back more than 50 years to the Cold War era.
New START was the last in a series of nuclear agreements between Moscow and Washington dating back more than half a century to the Cold War.
Besides setting numerical limits on weapons, they included inspection regimes that experts say served to build a level of trust and confidence between the nuclear adversaries, helping make the world safer.
If nothing replaces the treaty, security analysts see a more dangerous environment with a higher risk of miscalculation. Forced to rely on worst-case assumptions about the other’s intentions, the US and Russia would see an incentive to increase their arsenals, especially as China plays catch-up with its own rapid nuclear build-up.
Trump has said he wants to replace New START with a better deal, bringing in China but Beijing has declined negotiations with Moscow and Washington. It has a fraction of their warhead numbers – an estimated 600, compared to around 4000 each for Russia and the US.
Repeating that position on Thursday, China said the expiration of the treaty was regrettable, and urged the US to resume dialogue with Russia on “strategic stability”.
Peskov said Russia would take a responsible approach. The White House said this week that Trump would decide the way forward on nuclear arms control, which he would “clarify on his own timeline”.
CONFUSION OVER EXACT TIMING
There was confusion over the exact timing of the expiry, but Peskov said it would be at the end of Thursday.
Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, who signed the treaty with then US President Barack Obama in 2010, said on Wednesday that New START and its predecessors were now “all in the past”.
Russia’s Foreign Ministry said Moscow’s assumption was that the treaty no longer applied and both sides were free to choose their next steps.
It said Russia was prepared to take “decisive military-technical countermeasures to mitigate potential additional threats to national security” but was also open to diplomacy.
Ukraine, which has been at war with Russia since Moscow’s 2022 invasion, said the treaty’s expiry was a consequence of Russian efforts to achieve the “fragmentation of the global security architecture” and called it “another tool for nuclear blackmail to undermine international support for Ukraine.”
UN CHIEF SAYS NUCLEAR RISK IS HIGHEST IN DECADES
Strategic nuclear weapons are the long-range systems that each side would use to strike the other’s capital, military and industrial centres in the event of a nuclear war.
They differ from so-called tactical nuclear weapons that have a lower yield and are designed for limited strikes or battlefield use.
If left unconstrained by any agreement, Russia and the US could each, within a couple of years, deploy hundreds more warheads beyond the New START limit of 1550, experts say.
“Transparency and predictability are among the more intangible benefits of arms control and underpin deterrence and strategic stability,” said Karim Haggag, director of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said the dissolution of decades of achievement in arms control “could not come at a worse time – the risk of a nuclear weapon being used is the highest in decades.”
He urged the sides to resume negotiations without delay to agree a successor framework restoring verifiable limits.
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