The 30th session of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty’s Special Verification Commission took place this week in Geneva, Switzerland, according to the U.S. State Department.
The meeting, which had not been held since 2003, involved delegations from the United States, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Ukraine discussing “questions relating to compliance with the obligations assumed under the Treaty,” according to the State Department, which declined to provide additional details about those discussions and the results of the two-day meeting.
The commission is intended to resolve INF-related implementation issues. The 1987 treaty required the United States and then-Soviet Union to eliminate ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges of 500 to 5,500 kilometers. The State Department in 2014 determined Russia had violated the treaty by flight-testing an intermediate-range ground-launched cruise missile.
The U.S. and Russia continue to trade INF violation allegations; last month, two senior members of the U.S. House of Representatives said Russia is in “material breach” of the treaty, which unidentified sources attributed to work toward deployment of a nuclear cruise missile. Meanwhile, Russia has claimed U.S. target missile tests for global missile defense and its production of armed drones violate the treaty.
Mikhail Ulyanov, director of the Russian Foreign Ministry’s Department of Nonproliferation and Arms Control, said in early October that the U.S. missile defense system undermines strategic stability and that the MK 41 Vertical Launching System the U.S. has deployed to Romania and Poland can launch intermediate-range cruise missiles and therefore violates the treaty. The U.S. side has disavowed these accusations.
