Mary Ilyushina, Robyn Dixon and Niha Masih
Russian 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, or INF, 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 attempted to portray Russia as open and resilient, ascending to the lost status of an independent superpower, and he laid out a neo-Soviet vision for Russia’s future.
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.”
While Putin has often said that Russia acted in response to the 2013-14 pro-democracy Maidan revolution in Ukraine, it was Russia that invaded and illegally annexed Crimea in 2014, a move that fomented a war in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region in which the Kremlin armed and supported pro-Russian separatists.
Putin accused the West of “using Ukraine both as a battering ram against Russia and as a training ground,” warning that increased Western military aid would prompt a tougher response from Russia. “One circumstance should be clear to everyone — the more long-range Western systems will come to Ukraine, the further we will be forced to push the threat away from our borders,” he said.
Putin skipped a similar speech to lawmakers last year. Tuesday’s address marked his first public comments since President Biden’s surprise visit to Kyiv on Monday, which was meant as a show of Western allies’ unity behind Ukraine.
Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said ahead of the address that Biden’s visit was not seen as “an extraordinary event” in Russia and had not prompted Putin to make any changes to his text.
Minutes after Putin finished speaking, the Russian Foreign Ministry announced that it had summoned the new U.S. ambassador to Moscow, Lynne Tracy, and issued a note of protest over “the expanding U.S. involvement in hostilities on the side of the Kyiv regime.”
Hundreds of officials and other dignitaries attended the nearly two-hour address, including solemn-looking lawmakers and officials, bored-looking religious leaders, and active-duty members of Russia’s military. The uniformed presence seemed intended to show respect for the military despite myriad complaints from soldiers about Russia’s botched mobilization, poor equipment and failures to pay promised benefits.
Despite any appearance of boredom, the crowd gave Putin four standing ovations in the best tradition of Soviet Politburo meetings.
In his remarks, Putin attempted to paint a picture of a unified country that broadly supports his strategy. But analysts noted that he declined, once again, to answer key questions: What are the goals of this war? When will it end? What does “victory” look like to him?
“Nothing was said about the situation at the front; after all, nothing significant, from a military point of view, was achieved during the whole year,” prominent Russian journalist Farida Rustamova wrote on her Telegram blog. “They failed to capture Kyiv — and Putin would have liked to celebrate the anniversary of his war there — but instead Biden arrived there and promised Ukraine new weapons. And in response [Putin] again threatens with nuclear weapons, using what he can.”
The Russian leader derided the tens of thousands of Russians who have fled the country since the start of the invasion, calling them “national traitors” and a fifth column. He asserted that Russian business executives with assets in the West would always be seen there as “second-rate citizens” while simultaneously shamed at home, but stopped short of launching what he called “a witch hunt” against them.
The speech generally failed to address the pleas of the “patriotic camp,” the pro-war hawks in Russia’s elite, who have repeatedly criticized the Russian military for being too soft on Ukraine and liberal-minded Russians, despite the devastation the Russian army has caused across Ukraine and Putin’s brutal crackdown on dissent at home.
In a drier tone, Putin offered various sweeteners to the general public, announcing an increase in the monthly minimum wage from about $216 to $250. He praised Russian economists for keeping the decline of the country’s economic output at just 2.1 percent. And he rolled out new benefits for the families of soldiers and workers in the military-industrial complex.
“His main task here is to normalize the war: It will be hard — we will live with the idea that it’s a necessity but, at the same time, it won’t disrupt ordinary life, and the economy will be developing,” said Russian political analyst Kirill Rogov. “This is a way to blarney the common people, persuade them it’s not all bad.”
Putin delivered the address exactly a year after he declared two eastern regions of Ukraine under the control of Russian proxies — Donetsk and Luhansk — to be sovereign states, falsely accusing Kyiv of committing genocide there and paving the way for the war. In September, Putin illegally claimed the annexation of those regions and two others, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, declaring that Russia would use all means at its disposal to defend them.
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