Vladimir Putin has signed a bill extending the last remaining nuclear weapons control treaty between Russia and the United States a week before the agreement was about to expire.
Both houses of the Russian parliament voted unanimously on Wednesday to extend the New Start contract for five years. Putin and U.S. President Joe Biden had discussed the nuclear deal a day earlier, and the Kremlin said it had agreed to complete the necessary enlargement measures in the next few days.
New Start ends on February 5th. The extension of the treaty does not require conference approval in the US but Russian lawmakers had to confirm the move. Russian diplomats said the extension will be confirmed by the exchange of diplomatic notes once the procedures are completed.
The treaty, signed in 2010 by US president Barack Obama and then-Russian president Dmitry Medvedev, limits each country to more than 1,550 warlords nuclear and 700 missiles and bombers were used, and they plan to sweep away on-site inspections to confirm compliance.
Biden indicated during the U.S. primary campaign that he would prefer to retain New Start, which was negotiated during his tenure as vice president under Obama.
Russia had long proposed to extend the treaty without any conditions or changes, but former president Donald Trump’s administration waited until last year to start talks and extended them. depending on the set of requests. Negotiations stalled, and months of bargaining failed to dilute differences.
After both Moscow and Washington withdrew from the 1987 Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty in 2019, New Start is the only remaining nuclear weapons control treaty between the two countries.
Earlier this month, Russia announced that it would continue to pursue the U.S. withdrawal from the Open Air Treaty, which allowed surveillance missions over military facilities to help building trust and transparency between Russia and the west.
Proponents of arms control advocated the expansion of New Start as an incentive to global security and urged Russia and the U.S. to start negotiating follow-up agreements.
Russia’s deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov, the country’s chief negotiator on New Start, said earlier in the week that Russia was ready to sit down for talks on possible arms cuts, which he pointed out that it should also introduce non-nuclear precision weapons with a strategic range.
Russia had extended New Start’s offer for five years before Biden took over – a potential prospect of the deal at the time it was signed.
Trump argued that the U.S. treaty put him at a disadvantage, and initially called on China to add as a party to the treaty. Beijing rejected the idea. The Trump administration then proposed to extend a fresh start for one year and sought to extend it to include limits on battlefield nuclear weapons and other changes, and talks stopped.