Putin halts participation in last U.S. nuclear treaty

President Vladimir Putin announced in a state of the nation address Tuesday that Moscow is “suspending” its participation in the New START nuclear nonproliferation agreement, the last remaining arms control treaty between the United States and Russia.

Putin said that Russia will not “withdraw” completely from the treaty, which has been extended to run through Feb. 4, 2026, but that Russia would not allow NATO countries to inspect its nuclear arsenal. He accused the alliance of helping Ukraine conduct drone strikes on Russian air bases that host strategic bombers that are part of the country’s nuclear forces.

The 2011 treaty placed “verifiable limits” on the number of intercontinental ballistic missiles and nuclear warheads deployed by the countries.

“Our relations have degraded, and that’s completely and utterly the U.S.’s fault,” Putin said.

“If the U.S. conducts tests, then so will we,” Putin said. “Nobody should have any illusions that global strategic parity can be destroyed.” Other nonproliferation agreements, including the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty have fallen apart in recent years.

Western officials reacted with alarm at Putin’s decision.

“The announcement by Russia that it’s suspending participation in New START is deeply unfortunate and irresponsible,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters. “We’ll be watching carefully to see what Russia actually does.”

Blinken noted the Biden administration’s role in extending New START in 2021. “We extended New START because it was clearly in the security interests of our country and actually in the security interests of Russia,” he said, adding: “We remain ready to talk about strategic arms limitations at any time with Russia irrespective of anything else going on in the world or in our relationship.”

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg was similarly critical of Putin’s announcement. “I regret today’s decision by Russia to suspend participation in the START treaty,” Stoltenberg said. As a result, he said, “the whole arms control architecture has been dismantled.” He added, “I strongly encourage Russia to reconsider its decision.”

In January, the State Department said Russia was violating the terms of the agreement and had not allowed U.S. inspectors to access Russian sites, which threatened “the viability of U.S.-Russian nuclear arms control.”

But experts said the accord was not dead. “[This is] not equal to leaving the treaty — I assume there will be no Russian buildup above the treaty limits,” Andrey Baklitskiy, an analyst with the U.N. Institute for Disarmament Research, said in a tweet. “But there will be much fewer opportunities to verify this … so compliance will be disputed.”

The suspension of the treaty shows that over the course of a year-long war, Putin has become even more convinced of his anti-Western views, said Tatiana Stanovaya, a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

“Today we see him much more radicalized and ready for escalation. We see an almost complete break with the traditional West and a willingness to accelerate the dismantling of strategic relations between Russia and the United States,” Stanovaya said.

In a broad speech, Putin ranged from accusing the West of a plot to destroy Russia to promising to build a new highway from Moscow to Vladivostok. He pointedly steered clear of his disastrous military defeats in Ukraine and growing casualties, glossed over economic challenges brought on by the war, and portrayed international isolation as a way for Russia to cleanse itself of harmful alien ideologies.

Putin kicked off the speech with a now-routine mix of fervent anti-Western attacks and conspiratorial tropes about Ukraine’s “neo-Nazi regime,” once again falsely claiming that the war was initiated by the West, forcing Russia to respond. The Russian president, who for most of the first year of his full-scale invasion refused to use the word “war,” used it during his speech, but only to cast blame on others for the military conflict that began on his orders.

“They were the ones who started the war,” Putin said, referring to Ukraine and Western “elites” supporting Kyiv. “We used force and continue to use it to stop it.”