Russia’s Medvedev issues warning as Moscow says not bound by missile treaty

Russia’s Medvedev issues warning as Moscow says not bound by missile treaty

According to the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the country is no longer bound by a moratorium on the deployment of short- and medium-range nuclear missiles, with former president Dmitry Medvedev blaming NATO’s “anti-Russian policy” and promising Moscow will “further steps” in response.

Medvedev, who has a verbal exchange with Donald Trump and the foreign ministry, made his most recent broadside on Monday.

Medvedev wrote in English on the X social media platform that the Russian Foreign Ministry’s decision to end the moratorium on the deployment of medium- and short-range missiles is the result of NATO’s anti-Russian policy.

“This is a brand-new reality that our adversaries must face.” He urged taking additional steps.

Medvedev, who is the deputy head of Russia’s powerful Security Council and has frequently criticized Russia’s nuclear arsenal, did not give any details on what “further steps” might entail.

In response to Medvedev’s comments about the potential for war between Washington and Moscow, Trump announced last week that he had ordered two US nuclear submarines to be relocated to “the appropriate regions.”

Russia’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement that it had to reevaluate its decision to deploy short- and medium-range missiles because of the changing circumstances in Europe and the Asia Pacific.

The Russian Foreign Ministry notes that the prerequisites for a unilateral moratorium on the deployment of similar weapons have been eliminated because the situation is evoking the actual deployment of US-made land-based medium and short-range missiles in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region.

Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia, and Sergei Lavrov, the country’s foreign minister, said last year that Moscow might need to lift restrictions on missile deployment in response to what they termed provocations by the US and NATO.

Lavrov claimed in December that Moscow’s unilateral moratorium on the deployment of such missiles was “practically no longer viable and will have to be abandoned.”

According to Lavrov, “the United States haughtily ignored warnings from Russia and China and instead moved on to deploying weapons of this caliber in various regions of the world.”

Under the first Trump administration, the US withdrew from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty in 2019, citing Russian non-compliance, but Moscow had stated that it would not use such weapons if Washington didn’t.

An entire class of weapons had been completely eliminated by the INF treaty, which was signed in 1987 by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and US President Ronald Reagan. They were ground-launched nuclear missiles with a range of 500 to 5, 500 km (311 to 3, 418 miles).

The Kremlin downplayed Trump’s remarks and said it was not intending to get into a public dispute with the US president on Monday. That was its first public comment.

It is obvious that American submarines are already engaged in combat, according to the situation. The first thing Dmitry Peskov, a spokesman for the Kremlin, said to reporters that this is an ongoing process.

We would not want to get involved in such a controversy and would not want to make any comments on it, he said in general.

We do, of course, think that everyone should be very cautious with nuclear rhetoric, he continued.

Trump threatens to impose new sanctions on Russia and oil-importing nations like China and India unless President Vladimir Putin agrees to a ceasefire in Moscow’s conflict with Ukraine by Friday.

Source: Aljazeera

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