U.S. and Russian officials on Wednesday renewed claims that their governments had violated the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty and sparred over the consequences of aggressive rhetoric toward one another. Jon Wolfsthal, senior director for arms control and nonproliferation at the National Security Council, said at the ExchangeMonitor Nuclear Deterrence Summit that the U.S. seeks a resolution regarding Russia’s violation of the INF Treaty.
The 1987 INF Treaty required the U.S. and then-Soviet Union to eliminate ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges of 500 to 5,500 kilometers. In 2014, the Department of State determined that Russia violated a core tenet of the treaty not to produce or flight test an intermediate-range ground-launched cruise missile, and has said it will consider economic and military responses. While the State Department has not elaborated on details of the violation, analysts have said the allegation might be based on a flight test of an RS-26 ballistic missile or R-511 cruise missile.
Sergey Kislyak, Russia’s ambassador to the United States, denied the charge, saying allegations of noncompliance are “black” and have not been explained properly by U.S. officials. Kislyak said Russia would like the United States to come back into compliance of the treaty, but Wolfsthal scoffed at the notion that there had been a U.S. breach in the first place. Russia has claimed that U.S. target missile tests for global missile defense and armed drone production violate the treaty.
Wolfsthal called the treaty violation claim a “false allegation” for which “if there is a sincere concern on the part of our Russian counterparts to . . . discuss these [issues] again then we are ready and prepared to do that, but only as part of a two-way discussion.” He added that “Russian security that will suffer more as a result of violating this treaty” and that it would be “politically challenging” to execute a follow-on agreement to the New START nuclear arms control accord while Moscow is breaching an older treaty.
“I take exception to the notion that we are violating INF Treaty,” Kislyak responded. He said the “veiled threats that Russian security is going to suffer” demonstrate that the U.S. position toward the bilateral relationship is not based on a willingness to build cooperation.
The relationship between the two nations has deteriorated in recent years, prompted in part by Russia’s incursion into Crimea. Along with the phasing out of the Cooperative Threat Reduction program that engaged the U.S. with Russia for nuclear material security initiatives since the early 1990s, officials on both sides are now question the future of bilateral nuclear arms reduction and nonproliferation efforts. These concerns have been compounded by Russia’s decision not to participate in the upcoming Nuclear Security Summit.
Kislyak encouraged greater investment in understanding Russia, affirming that his nation will not allow itself to be “pushed around.” He said U.S. language that highlights “deterring Russia, containing Russia, introduction of financial sanctions in order to undermine [Russian] economy, isolating Russia,” has been damaging to the relationship. “How do you think all of this is seen from Moscow?”
Wolfsthal countered that the Obama administration has been “very well restrained in terms of talking about what we see in Russian behavior, in part because we do not want to feed into this action-reaction cycle that we feel undermines our own security and that leaves Russia in a less secure place which can lead to even further provocations.” He called the U.S. rhetoric “rather mild and diplomatic,” and that “if anything, the volume has been relatively low.”
Kislyak disagreed. “For us, the level is very high,” he said, especially when discussing the threat Russia poses to the U.S. and its allies. Kislyak called it “mind-boggling” that the U.S. does not acknowledge that Russia is not planning aggressive actions toward its neighbors. “Everything that happened – Georgia, Ukraine – was forced on us . . . with your support,” he said, referring to Russia’s war with Georgia over separatist South Caucasus territories and the more recent conflict with Ukraine that further divided the U.S. and Russia.
On the issue of strategic cooperation, Wolfsthal said that despite the “overwhelming pessimism that pervades some of the discussions here,” strategic nuclear arms control has consistently survived fluctuations in the two nations’ strategic relationship. He closed by offering to “sit down with the full interagency teams on our side and your side, and let’s have those discussions.” Wolfsthal’s comment was based on Kislyak’s statements hinting that Moscow might be willing to ease its position if the United States take steps on matters, such as rolling back its European missile defense, that it lists as prerequisites for further negotiations. Kislyak, however, then told Wolfsthal that Russia’s policy has not changed.
