Sergei Lavrov said “
niet
”.
Certainly, the Russian Foreign Minister did not completely close the door to future negotiations between Moscow and Washington on nuclear power, but by setting conditions such that they are in fact postponed
sine die
.
“
We do not reject this idea for the future, but we condition this possibility on the abandonment by the West of its policy aimed at undermining and not respecting the interests of Russia
,” declared this Thursday, January 18 the head of Russian diplomacy during his annual press conference in Moscow.
And Lavrov translates: “
We do not see the slightest interest on the part of the United States or NATO in resolving the Ukrainian conflict and listening to Russia’s concerns
.”
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Simple, Moscow's message is similar to another form of nuclear standoff than the traditional maneuvers of strategic forces and declarations on Russian doctrine: there will be no discussion on nuclear power with Washington as long as a solution acceptable for Russia will not be found in Ukraine.
However, by thus linking Ukraine and nuclear power, while no prospect of an end to the war is on the horizon, Moscow
de facto
buries any serious discussion on the theme of “
strategic stability
” with Washington, in all. case in the near future.
“
We must 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 Reuters.
New Start, pillar of arms control
The stakes of these talks are not small: entered into force in 2011 when Sergei Lavrov was already Minister of Foreign Affairs, the Russian-American New Start treaty, the main pillar of strategic arms control between the two former giants of Cold War, will officially expire in 2026. It is in reality already brain dead: it was initially due 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 mandate, who was more open to bilateral discussions than his predecessor Donald Trump, now the Republican camp's favorite for the 2024 presidential election. But since the Russian invasion of February 24, 2022, the war in Ukraine has passed by.
One year after the start of the conflict, on February 21, 2023, Vladimir Putin announced that Russia was “
suspending
” its participation in New Start.
Formally, it is not a funeral, but, in fact, the precious bilateral convention between the United States and Russia is almost obsolete.
Heir to the old SALT, START and SORT treaties of the Cold War, New Start was nevertheless very useful for stability between Moscow and Washington in nuclear matters.
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 ceilings for their launchers: intercontinental ballistic missiles;
nuclear ballistic missile submarines and their missiles;
strategic bombers.
Since 2011, the format of deterrence in the United States and Russia has been stable.
Without New Start, nothing would prevent the two nuclear superpowers from relaunching an arms race.
New Start not only sets quantitative limits, but also authorizes mutual inspections of Russian and American arsenals, as well as an exchange of information relating to the latter.
The idea is to dispel the fog in this area and to avoid as much as possible any accident linked to an erroneous perception of the adversary's capabilities.
Since the end of February 2023, all these guarantees have been “
suspended
” unless they are buried.
Also read: China now deploys 500 nuclear warheads, according to the Pentagon
For Moscow and Washington, the countdown is on: on February 5, 2026, in just over two years, New Start will have definitively expired.
The whole question remains whether, by then, the Russians and Americans will be able to negotiate, sign and ratify a new bilateral strategic arms reduction treaty which could succeed it.
But no one can predict the future of the war in Ukraine, which has already lasted for almost two years.
In its war communication, Moscow accuses the West in particular of providing the Ukrainians with long-range weapons that they would use to strike Russian territory, and thus of making the defense of Ukraine a pretext to directly weaken Russia.
But behind these elements of language which have hardly changed since 2022 depending on the armaments delivered to Kiev, another, more prosaic reality appears: Moscow has not achieved its war goals and is not ready, at this stage, to negotiate.
The other big question about future Russian-American negotiations around nuclear power is of an electoral nature.
Because, while it is easy to guess that Vladimir Putin will be re-elected to the Kremlin in March, there is nothing to say who will take up residence in the White House following the presidential election next November.
During his mandate, from 2016 to 2020, Donald Trump displayed a fierce rejection of all bilateral or multilateral treaties that legally linked the United States to other states.
The uncertainty is therefore total.
“
I think the Russians will want to come back to the table at some point, and ideally before the expiration, but Russia could also be unpredictable
,” cautiously argued Pranay Vaddi, who believes that Lavrov’s statements “
cast doubt on Moscow's desire to engage in dialogue on the follow-up to New START or the return to compliance
.
Nuclear modernization
For twenty years, well before the war in Ukraine, Russia has been engaged in several programs to renew and modernize its strategic nuclear forces, such as its new Sarmat intercontinental missile (still under testing), its new sub-nuclear
Borei
nuclear sailors
(already seven in service) and their Bulava missiles, and the relaunch of the production of Tupolev Tu-160 supersonic bombers.
Above all, Moscow has added to its strategic nuclear arsenal weapons not provided for by New Start, such as the Avangard hypersonic glider or the Poseidon nuclear torpedo.
The United States is also engaged in a modernization program, still marked by several unknowns: although the B-21 bomber and Columbia
submarine projects
have been launched, the future of the Minuteman intercontinental missiles has not yet been decided. and continues to be debated across the Atlantic.
The possible death in 2026 of the New Start treaty, already dying, is therefore not anecdotal, especially since all the other major Russian-American treaties resulting from the Cold War have also been buried for twenty years.
This was for example the case in 2002 of the ABM treaty, which has regulated anti-missile defenses since 1972, and in 2018 of the INF treaty, which banned all land-based missiles with a range of 500 to 5,500 km.
In 2020, a multilateral convention, the Open Skies Treaty, collapsed.
In parallel with this collapse of the arms control structure resulting from the Cold War, concern is growing over China, bound by no treaty with Washington and which has been experiencing an unprecedented nuclear arms race for five years, which explains moreover in part the desire of the United States to withdraw from the major Russian-American bilateral treaties.
“
Strategic stability
” is therefore not for tomorrow.