The so-called “strategic stability talks,” aimed at finding a successor to the Russian-American New Start Treaty by 2026, have stalled.
Sergei Lavrov said “never.” To be sure, the Russian foreign minister has not completely closed the door to future negotiations between Moscow and Washington on nuclear power, but has set the terms in such a way that they are effectively postponed indefinitely. “We do not reject this idea for the future, but we make this possibility conditional on the West abandoning its policies aimed at undermining and disrespecting Russia's interests,” the head of Russian diplomacy said on Thursday, January 18, during its annual press conference in Moscow. And Lavrov translated: “We do not see the slightest interest on the part of the USA or NATO in resolving the Ukraine conflict and listening to Russia’s concerns.”
In short, Moscow's message resembles a different form of nuclear standoff than the traditional maneuvers of strategic forces and statements on Russian doctrine: There will be no discussion of nuclear power with Washington until a solution acceptable to Russia is found in Ukraine. However, this connection between Ukraine and nuclear power, while there is no prospect of an end to the war in sight, effectively kills any serious discussion of “strategic stability” with Washington, at least in the near future. “We have to take Russia at its word. They refuse to engage bilaterally on these issues,” said Pranay Vaddi, the director of arms control at the White House Security Council, as quoted by Portal.
New beginnings, pillar of arms control
There is quite a bit at stake in these talks: The Russian-American New Start Treaty, the main pillar of strategic arms control between the two former Cold War giants, came into force in 2011, when Sergei Lavrov was already foreign minister 2026 out. In reality, it is already brain dead: it was originally scheduled to expire in 2021 and was only extended for five years at the last minute, two days before the fateful date. It was at the very beginning of Joe Biden's term in office, who was more open to bilateral talks than his predecessor Donald Trump, now the Republican camp's favorite for the 2024 presidential election. But since the Russian invasion on February 24, 2022, war has been raging in Ukraine passed by. A year after the conflict began, on February 21, 2023, Vladimir Putin announced that Russia would “suspend” its participation in New Start. Formally it is not a funeral, but in fact the valuable bilateral agreement between the United States and Russia is almost obsolete.
As a successor to the old SALT, START and SORT treaties of the Cold War, New Start was nevertheless very useful for stability between Moscow and Washington on nuclear issues. For the two States Parties to the Convention, the text limited the number of deployed strategic nuclear warheads to 1,550 each and added several caps on their delivery vehicles: intercontinental ballistic missiles; Nuclear ballistic missile submarines and their missiles; strategic bombers. Since 2011, the format of deterrence in the USA and Russia has been stable. Without New Start, nothing would stop the two nuclear superpowers from resuming the arms race. New Start not only sets quantitative limits, but also authorizes mutual inspections of Russian and American arsenals and the exchange of information about the latter. The idea is to disperse the fog in this area and to avoid as much as possible accidents based on an incorrect assessment of the opponent's capabilities. As of the end of February 2023, all of these guarantees are “suspended” unless they are buried.
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The countdown has begun for Moscow and Washington: on February 5, 2026, in just over two years, New Start will finally have expired. The whole question remains whether by then the Russians and the Americans will be able to negotiate, sign and ratify a new bilateral strategic arms reduction treaty that could become its successor. But no one can predict the future of the war in Ukraine, which has been going on for almost two years. In its war communications, Moscow particularly accuses the West of equipping the Ukrainians with long-range weapons with which they would attack Russian territory, thereby using Ukraine's defense as a pretext for directly weakening Russia. But behind these language elements, which have hardly changed since 2022 depending on the armaments delivered to Kiev, another, more prosaic reality emerges: Moscow has not achieved its war goals and is not prepared to negotiate at this point.
The other big question about future Russian-American negotiations on nuclear energy is electoral. Because while it's easy to guess that Vladimir Putin will be re-elected to the Kremlin in March, there's no telling who will move into the White House after the presidential election next November. During his term in office from 2016 to 2020, Donald Trump demonstrated a strong rejection of any bilateral or multilateral treaties that legally linked the United States with other states. So the uncertainty is total. “I think the Russians will want to return to the negotiating table at some point and ideally before the deadline, but Russia could also be unpredictable,” argued cautiously Pranay Vaddi, who believes that Lavrov’s comments “raise doubts about Moscow’s willingness to agree.” engage.” Dialogue about monitoring New START or returning to compliance.
Nuclear modernization
For twenty years, long before the war in Ukraine, Russia was involved in several programs to renew and modernize its strategic nuclear forces, such as its new Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile (still being tested), its new Borei subnuclear nuclear sailors (already). seven in use) and their Bulava missiles as well as the resumption of production of the Tupolev Tu-160 supersonic bomber. Above all, Moscow has expanded its strategic nuclear arsenal to include weapons that New Start does not provide for, such as the Avangard hypersonic glider or the Poseidon nuclear torpedo. The United States is also pursuing a modernization program that is still characterized by several unknowns: although the B-21 bomber and Columbia submarine projects have been launched, the future of the Minuteman ICBMs has not yet been decided and continues to be discussed across the Atlantic .
The possible death of the New Start Treaty in 2026, which is already dying, is therefore not an isolated case, especially since all other major Russian-American treaties that emerged from the Cold War have also been buried for twenty years. This was the case, for example, in 2002 with the ABM Treaty, which has governed missile defense since 1972, and in 2018 with the INF Treaty, which banned all land-based missiles with a range of 500 to 5,500 km. In 2020, a multilateral agreement, the Open Skies Treaty, collapsed. In parallel with this collapse of the arms control structure as a result of the Cold War, there is growing concern about China, which is not bound by any treaty with Washington and has been experiencing an unprecedented nuclear arms race for five years, which, moreover, partly explains China's desire that the United States withdraw from the withdraw from major Russian-American bilateral agreements. “Strategic stability” is therefore not something for tomorrow.