US warns Russia over ‘illegal missile’
• Washington says Moscow is defying Cold War treaty
US defence secretary Jim Mattis said on Thursday that Russia’s violation of an armscontrol treaty was “untenable” and unless it changed course the US would respond.
US defence secretary Jim Mattis said on Thursday that Russia’s violation of an arms-control treaty was “untenable” and unless it changed course the US would respond.
The US says Russia is developing a ground-launched system in breach of a Cold War treaty — the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) — that could enable Moscow to launch a nuclear strike on Europe at short notice. Russia has consistently denied any such violation.
“Russia must return to compliance with the INF treaty or the US will need to respond to its cavalier disregard to the treaty’s specific limits,” Mattis told reporters after a meeting of Nato defence ministers in Brussels.
“The United States is reviewing options in our diplomacy and defence posture to do just that. Make no mistake: the current situation, with Russia in blatant violation of this treaty, is untenable,” Mattis said.
He declined to give details on the possible US response. The 1987 INF bans medium-range missiles capable of hitting Europe or Alaska and ended a Cold War-era crisis, when the Soviet Union installed nearly 400 nuclear warheads pointed at Western Europe.
Nato secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg said Moscow had developed a missile known as Novator 9M729, which analysts say is similar to Russian shortrange, sea-launched missiles but can travel between 500km and 5,500km.
Mattis’s comments are likely to worsen relations between Moscow and the West, already at a post-Cold War low since Russia’s 2014 seizure of Crimea, its bombing campaign in Syria and accusations of meddling in Western elections.
While the US has called for Russia to return to compliance with the INF treaty for several years, Mattis’s comments come just days after Washington’s envoy to Nato said that Russia had to halt its covert development of the missile system or the US would seek to destroy it before it became operational. The US ambassador to Nato, Kay Bailey Hutchison, said on Tuesday that Washington remained committed to a diplomatic solution but was prepared to “take out” any Russian missile if development of the mediumrange system continued.
The Russian foreign ministry reacted by saying Hutchison’s comments were dangerous. Hutchison clarified that she was not talking about a pre-emptive strike against Russia.
The top US general in Europe said that the US needed to make strong statements on Russia’s violation. “We also will take the steps necessary to ensure that we don’t have any gaps in a credible defence and deterrence posture,” Gen Curtis Scaparrotti, head of US European Command and Nato’s supreme allied commander, told reporters.
A recent US state department report said that Russia had violated obligations “not to possess, produce or flight-test” a ground-launched cruise missile with a range capability of 500km to 5,500km, “or to possess or produce launchers of such missiles”.
Earlier this year, the US military said in a new national defence strategy that countering Russia, along with China, would be a priority. The move reflects shifting US priorities after more than a decade and a half of focusing on the fight against Islamist militants.
The Pentagon’s nuclear policy document released in February said that in response to Russia’s violation, the US would start reviewing its own options for conventional, ground-launched, intermediate-range missile systems.
Kingston Reif, the director for disarmament research at the Arms Control Association advocacy group, cautioned that if the US also abandoned the INF treaty, it would allow Russia to potentially station hundreds of missiles near Europe.
Any new US missile system would also be politically difficult to station in Europe as no Nato ally would want to host it, he said.