The Foreign Ministry pointed to the US ignoring the causes of the START crisis

The United States continues to stubbornly ignore the causes that led to the crisis around the Strategic Offensive Arms Treaty (START) concluded between Moscow and Washington. About it says in the comments of the official representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharova, in connection with the statements of the National Security Adviser to the President of the United States, Jake Sullivan.

Sullivan said on June 2 that the United States ready to engage with Russia to create a new post-2026 nuclear arms control system. According to him, the United States will continue to comply with START until 2026, if Russia does so.

There are no fundamentally new points in Sullivan’s statement that would take into account Moscow’s positions, Zakharova noted. In her opinion, the United States, with its “boring calls” to resume cooperation in the field of arms control, seeks to do this on American terms.

“Washington continues to stubbornly ignore the reasons that led to the current crisis in this area. US officials continue to pretend that this crisis has nothing to do with the openly hostile American policy towards us, which eventually acquired the finished form of an all-out hybrid war against our country, ”the statement says.

Moscow sees no sign of US readiness to abandon the goal of inflicting a “strategic defeat” on Russia and “virtually remove Russia from the international arena as a sovereign and full-fledged political player,” Zakharova said. It is necessary to understand that the era of “unquestionable American dominance” is over, now the challenge is to start laying the foundations for a more “fair, balanced and stress-resistant international system”, taking into account the interests of all states, she added.

The need to suspend the START in February was announced by Russian President Vladimir Putin. He motivated this decision by saying that under the conditions of a special military operation, US inspections of Russian enterprises and other facilities could be used to the detriment of Russia’s interests.

On May 18, a group of Republican senators submitted a bill to the US Congress to withdraw the country from START. According to them, the decision of President Joe Biden to extend the treaty with Russia was a mistake and fettered the United States, and also “did not provide America and its allies with security.”

On June 2, Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that there were no “blueprints” between Russia and the United States regarding negotiations on strategic security, although “there should be unambiguous.” Contacts on START are conducted through diplomatic channels, Peskov specified.

START was signed in 2010 by Russian and US Presidents Dmitry Medvedev and Barack Obama. The document spoke about the reduction of strategic nuclear forces (SNF) to the level of 700 deployed and a total of 800 deployed and non-deployed strategic delivery vehicles. The treaty provided for detailed inspections at the sites of production and deployment of carriers of strategic nuclear weapons and the exchange of telemetry data during testing of new types of missiles.