(CNSNews.com) – A senior Russian official said on Thursday that Moscow was compelled to halt participation in New START because the U.S. was abusing its inspection rights under the arms control treaty by passing on information to help Ukraine attack strategic facilities inside Russia.
The claim by Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov marks a new “justification” for the Kremlin’s suspending implementation of the 2010 treaty. When President Vladimir Putin announced the move in a speech last month, he offered more general complaints about NATO seeking Russia’s “strategic defeat.”
Addressing the U.N. Commission on Disarmament in Geneva, Ryabkov accused the U.S. and NATO of posing the “most strategic threat” to Russia.
“The situation has further degraded following the U.S. attempts to probe the security of the Russian strategic facilities – declared under the New START Treaty – by assisting the Kyiv regime in conducting armed attacks against them,” he said through a interpreter.
“Against this backdrop, we perceive as highly cynical the demands made by Washington to regain access to Russia's nuclear facilities, to inspect them under the New START Treaty.”
Ryabkov said this came at a time when the U.S. and allied nuclear weapons states Britain and France “have set their aim to be to strategically defeat Russia in a total hybrid war unleashed against us.”
“Under these circumstances, we were forced to announce the suspension of the treaty.”
Russia, whose invasion of Ukraine recently moved into its second year, has accused Kyiv of carrying out drone attacks against targets hundreds of miles inside Russian territory – including, last December, against the Engels-2 air base, which houses nuclear-capable bombers.
Reuters quoted Ryabkov as telling reporters after his speech Thursday that Ukraine would not have been able to mount drone attacks against Russian infrastructure “in [the] absence of a very deep and sophisticated assistance by the U.S. to the Ukrainian military.”
In a statement to the Geneva gathering, U.S. Ambassador Bruce Turner denied the allegations.
“Russia’s claims of U.S. noncompliance with New START, or that the United States is helping Ukraine through inspections to target facilities, are neither credible nor constructive,” he said.
“Russia’s willingness to promote instability and use irresponsible nuclear rhetoric reinforces the need for the United States and its allies to support each other,” Turner said.
“It is critical, now more than ever, that nuclear powers act responsibly – in our statements, in our bilateral and multilateral decisions, and in our actions that could impact strategic arms control and non-proliferation,” he said. “Unfortunately, we are not seeing that this moment from the Russian Federation.”
Commenting Thursday on more general Russian claims that the U.S. is helping Ukraine mount drone attacks inside Russia, Pentagon press secretary Patrick Ryder called them “nonsense.”
“I have seen some press reporting from Russian officials, first of all, alleging that the U.S. was somehow providing information to enable these types of attacks,” he told a briefing.
“I can say definitively that the notion of the U.S. providing intelligence or information to the Ukrainians to target locations inside Russia is nonsense,” he said. “We are not at war with Russia, nor do we seek war with Russia. Our focus is purely on supporting Ukraine to defend itself – and so that’s what we’ll continue to do.”
Ryder also said he could not confirm whether the Ukrainians have in fact carried out such attacks.
No inspections since early 2020
Under the New START (Strategic Arms Reduction) Treaty, the U.S. and Russia agreed to restrict the number of deployed nuclear warheads to 1,550 each; the number of deployed missiles and bombers to 700 each; and the number of nuclear weapons launchers to 800 each.
Ryabkov in his remarks Thursday reiterated that Russia, despite its suspension of participation in the treaty, would continue to comply with the limitations.
The treaty provides for the sides to carry out spot-checks at each other’s nuclear facilities ten times a year, a process aimed at providing confidence in the accuracy of warhead numbers declared.
It is those inspections that Ryabkov was apparently accusing the U.S. of exploiting to benefit Kyiv.
In fact, New START inspections have not taken place since early 2020, when both sides agreed to suspend them because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
When the U.S. sought to resume the inspections last summer, Russia refused, on the grounds that that sanctions imposed on it as a result of the invasion of Ukraine were effectively making it impossible for Russia to carry out inspections on U.S. territory, thereby providing “unilateral advantages for the United States.”
The U.S. government refuted those claims.
“Our sanctions and restrictive measures imposed as a result of Moscow’s brutal, unjustified aggression against Ukraine are fully compatible with New START,” State Department spokesman Ned Price said at the time. “They don’t prevent Russian inspectors from conducting New START Treaty inspections in the United States.”
Despite the suspension of inspections, the U.S. and Russia did continue providing declarations and notifications in line with the treaty.
At the end of January, however, the State Department informed Congress that it could no longer certify that Russia was complying with its New START obligations.
It cited both Moscow’s refusal to allow a resumption of inspections, and its failure to meet a requirement to attend a meeting of the treaty’s bilateral consultative commission. Russia withdrew from a scheduled meeting of the commission days before it was to be held in Cairo in November.
During a brief discussion with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in New Delhi on Thursday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken urged Russia to reverse its suspension of New START implementation.