Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday announced that the country will be suspending its participation in the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START). With that, Washington and Moscow will no longer have any arms control agreement between them. While Putin said that Russia will not pull out of the treaty completely for the moment, the suspension of the agreement means that Russia will no longer allow the US or its NATO allies to conduct on-site inspections of its nuclear weaponry.

“Our relations have degraded and that’s completely and utterly the US’s fault,” Putin said during his long-delayed state of the union speech.

What is START?

The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) is a bilateral arms control agreement between the US and the Russian Federation to reduce the number of offensive nuclear strategic weapons that either country possesses. The first START, or START I, was signed between the US and the Soviet Union in 1991 and was enforced by 1994.

The agreement limited the two countries to deploy only 1,600 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and bombers and no more than 6,000 nuclear warheads at a time. The treaty also allowed each side to conduct on-site inspections of the other’s nuclear machinery and inform the other about notifications relating to the proscribed arms and facilities.

By 2001, the treaty was successful in reducing the number of active nuclear weaponry in the world by a considerable amount. At the beginning of 2022, a total of 12,700 nuclear warheads existed across the globe compared to nearly 64,000 nuclear warheads in 1985. Russia and the US together account for 90 percent of the global nuclear arsenal.

What happened to the treaty?

The treaty expired in December 2009, but both sides negotiated to create a similar arms control agreement to replace it. Less than five months later, New START was signed and ratified by US President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. The proposed treaty went into effect in January 2011 and was supposed to be the primary nuclear arms control treaty between the two nations until February 2026.

President Donald Trump tried to renegotiate a new treaty between the US and Russia over nuclear arms control but failed to make any headway. After taking office, President Joe Biden signed the most recent five-year extension in 2021.

However, the treaty has had a troubled start since its last extension. The on-site inspections were first been halted as part of the COVID-19 global restrictions. However, with the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Russia halted attempts to restart inspections due to the increasing tensions with the West. Anatoly Antonov, the Russian Ambassador to the US, had said at the time that while Russia “remains committed to the goals of the New START treaty” it would not restart on-site inspections as Russia considered it “unjustified, untimely and inappropriate to invite the US military to our strategic facilities” while the US supported Ukraine.

Now Putin has stated that he would resume inspections when the US and its allies hold talks on the war in Ukraine with Russia without the participation of Ukraine itself.

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(Edited by : Pradeep John)