Russia will abandon its unilateral missile moratorium, Lavrov says

Move comes amid fears of new arms race

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov speaks to Russian and foreign journalists in Moscow, Russia, Thursday, December 26, 2024. (Russian Foreign Ministry Press Service via AP)

Russia will scrap a moratorium on the stationing of intermediate and shorter range nuclear-capable missiles because the US has posted such weapons in various regions around the world, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Sunday.

Russia's move, long signalled, will kill off all that remains from one of the most significant arms control treaties of the Cold War, amid fears that the world's two biggest nuclear powers could be entering a new arms race together with China.

Russia and the US, who both admit their relations are worse than at any time since the depths of the Cold War, have both expressed regret about the disintegration of the tangle of arms control treaties which sought to slow the arms race and reduce the risk of nuclear war.

Asked by state news agency RIA if Russia could withdraw from the New START treaty before its expiry in February 2026, Mr Lavrov said that there were currently “no conditions” for a strategic dialogue with Washington.

“Today it is clear that, for example, our moratorium on the deployment of short- and intermediate-range missiles is no longer practically viable and will have to be abandoned,” Mr Lavrov said.

“The US has arrogantly ignored the warnings of Russia and China and in practice has moved on to the deployment of weapons of this class in various regions of the world.”

An US-made MIM-104 Patriot surface-to-air missile is launched during a live fire exercise at the Chiupeng missile base in Pingtung county on August 20, 2024. AFP

The Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, signed by Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan in 1987, marked the first time the superpowers had agreed to reduce their nuclear arsenals and eliminated a whole category of nuclear weapons.

The US under former president Donald Trump formally withdrew from the INF Treaty in 2019 after saying that Moscow was violating the accord, an accusation the Kremlin repeatedly denied and dismissed as a pretext.

Russia then imposed a moratorium on its own development of missiles previously banned by the INF treaty – ground-based ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges of 500km to 5,500km.

Mr Trump in 2018 said he wanted to terminate the INF Treaty because of what he said were years of Russian violations and his concerns about China’s intermediate-range missile arsenal.

The US publicly blamed Russia's development of the 9M729 ground-launched cruise missile, known in Nato as the SSC-8, as the reason for it leaving the INF Treaty.

In his moratorium proposal, Mr Putin suggested Russia could agree not to post the missiles in its Baltic coast exclave of Kaliningrad. Since leaving the pact, the US has tested missiles with a similar profile.

Russia fired a new intermediate-range hypersonic ballistic missile known as “Oreshnik”, or Hazel Tree, at Ukraine on November 21 in what Mr Putin said was a direct response to strikes on Russia by Ukrainian troops with US and British missiles.